For Instructors
Overview of the Web-based Teaching Unit and Target Audience
This Web-Based Teaching Unit was created to help students, who are going to the Russian speaking countries for a summer, learn basic phrases they will need when they want to buy groceries. The students targeted in this unit are ones who studied Russian language for at least two semesters and have a basic knowledge of the Russian language and grammar. These requirements are essential to understand all the presented information. Such parts of the unit as Dairy Products and Meat Products have cases when words change their endings when used in Genitive case. Therefore, knowledge of the Genitive case is especially required in order to understand the examples.
This Web-based Teaching Unit has two main educational parts:
The Vocabulary section of the Web-Based Teaching Unit introduces students to the Russian words for the most often bought products. This part consist of a picture of the product, English name for the product, Russian name for the product, and an audio demonstrating pronunciation of the word in Russian. Students should listen carefully to the audio to learn to put stress on the right syllable of the word.
The Groceries Guide is a more complex section of the Web-Based Teaching Unit. It consists of four parts: Dairy Products, Meat Products, Wines and Spirits, and Other Products. Each of these parts offers basic phrases, which are necessary to know for shopping, in the form of dialogues. We divided these phrases into three categories: Do you have..., Where can I buy..., and Sample Shopping. In order to help students understand how they can use these phrases in real life, they are given a video that demonstrates each dialogue. After going through all the material, they can try out the interactive tasks to check their progress.
Objectives of the Web-Based Teaching Unit:
Theoretical Discussion
This unit was designed considering several recent theories from the TESOL area. Deborah Healey in "Classroom Practice: Communicative Skill-Building Tasks in CALL Environments" says that technology can help students learn vocabulary. She is saying that technology can help learners fit words into a semantic category. "Programs that incorporate graphics and sound can be especially helpful in creating multiple connections to the new words" (1999). Our Vocabulary section of the Web-based Teaching Unit incorporates both graphics and audio so learners have an opportunity not only to read the word, but also to see the graphic representation of the word and hear how it sounds.
Jan L. Plass et al, in "Supporting Visual and Verbal Learning Preferences in a Second-Language Multimedia Learning Environment" also discuss the importance of visual and verbal representation when learning new words. Moreover, the authors say that students achieve better results if they have the choice of using both verbal and visual representation of the words. "Students remembered word translations better when they had selected both visual and verbal annotations during learning than only 1 or no annotation" (1998). Our Teaching Unit includes both verbal and visual representation of the material, thus giving students the opportunity to learn using both kinds of representation.
Catherine J. Doughty and Michael H. Long in "Optimal Psycholinguistic Environments for Distance Foreign Language Learning" discuss implementation of ten methodological principles for Task-Based Language Teaching; one of these principles is promoting "learning by doing" (2003). They say that "practical hands-on experience with real-world tasks brings abstract concepts and theories to life and makes them more understandable. New knowledge is better integrated into long-term memory and more easily retrieved if tied to real-world events and activities" (2003). Our unit introduces learners to the real-world situation where learners not only learn words and phrases related to shopping, but also watch the video introducing them to a real shopping situation at a Russian store. Also, the topic that they are offered to learn is the one that they will use in practice and not just any topic that might be of no interest to them.
Using the Web-Based Teaching Unit
We provide a suggested Lesson Plans that we created for you. We hope you find it useful and valuable for your teaching needs.