Article
Developing and Validating an Academic Vocabulary List in Russian: A Computational Approach
To date, attempts at empirically validating a construct of academic vocabulary in the form of a frequency list in languages other than English remain conspicuously absent in peer‐reviewed journals. This study aims to close this gap by using Russian as a case study to develop an academic vocabulary list and prove its viability through a variety of data science methods, including cross‐validation and out‐of‐sample coverage. Our findings support the utility of such a construct in Russian and its potential impact on teaching Russian for academic purposes.
The book is intended for undergraduate and graduate students of the Higher School of Economics. Its main objective is developing academic skills, namely enriching students’ academic vocabulary, which is an integral part of their professional education. Being able to use appropriate academic vocabulary in writing is essential for this kind of activity.
Developing Academic Literacy correlates with the book Academic Vocabulary in Use by Michael McCarthy and Felicity O’Dell (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and can be used as a source of additional exercises to practice topics covered there. Out of 50 units presented in this book we have chosen 45 which are of particular importance for the context of the National Research University. However, each unit of the present book contains not only practical exercises but also a theoretical part explaining the use of studied lexical units. Thus, the book can be used independently. As each unit covers a different lexical topic, the units can be studied in any order.
The tasks are aimed at both recognizing the lexis (on its own and within short contexts) and using it. The exercises comprise such tasks as matching words with their definitions, synonyms, antonyms, completing sentences with appropriate words, matching parts of sentences. Special attention is paid to collocations in academic context. The illustrative examples have mostly been taken from the British National Corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English and monolingual English dictionaries.
The book can be used both in class and individually. The exercises are provided with the Key, which allows students to check their answers, and, thus, makes the book suitable for self-study purposes. The book is provided with the Resource bank, which consists of abstracts from academic articles. All the abstracts contain lexical units studied in the book and can be used as a source of additional exercises by a teacher or self-check material by a student.
The paper presents the most frequent words of everyday spoken Russian, that form the upper zones of several word frequency lists compiled on the material of Russian speech corpus “One Speaker’s Day” (the ORD corpus), containing real-life recordings of everyday communication. All speech data in the corpus is annotated in terms of communication settings, including 1) type of communication (language spoken style), 2) social role of speaker, 3) locus, etc. Such information allows speech to be filtered upon user request and therefore makes it possible to study speech variation depending on particular communication settings. The given study was made on the transcripts of 152 real-life macroepisodes and contains 232,370 words. The sample presents speech of 209 persons (95 men, 94 women, 20 children). The following word frequency lists have been compiled: a) general frequency list, b) male frequency list, c) female frequency list, and d) four frequency lists for different styles of spoken speech: informal conversations, professional/business conversations, educational communication, and “customer-service” communication. Men’s and women’s frequency lists have been compiled on the subsamples of 83,371 and 115,110 words correspondently. The analysis of word lists has shown that Russian women pay more attention to maintaining the conversation, use fewer hesitations, and are more inclined to use in their speech intensifying words, emotional words, hedges and interjections. Men generally use fewer personal pronouns, while numbers and the expletives are among the most frequent words used by men in everyday conversations. In general, these observations are similar to those described earlier for gender variation by other linguists.
The article is focused on the co-occurrence of different types of adverbs with participles of varying degrees of adjectivation in the modern Russian language. Examples of the use of adverbs and participial forms are given. Conclusions are drawn about the role of adverbs in the process of adjectivization.
The structure of Russian everyday dialogue was studied on the basis of 73 microdialogues of everyday speech communication from the ʽOne Day of Speechʼ corpus (the ORD Corpus). The aim of the research was to find out what types of speech acts commonly initiate and complete everyday dialogues, as well as to reveal the most typical sequences of speech acts in these dialogues. Altogether, 2230 speech acts of 30 people referring to both professional, and household conversations have been analysed. N-gram analysis has been used to calculate the most frequent sequences of speech acts. The obtained results showed that dialogues are usually started by representatives, i.e. speech acts related to the exchange of information (38% of all cases), etiquette beginnings (greetings, vocatives) take place in 23% of the dialogues, and in 19% of cases the conversation begins with a regulative form. Speech acts ending dialogues show a greater variety: representatives contribute 2% of all dialogue ends, valuative judgments and regulatory forms cover 14% each, further go directives (8%), commissions (8%), etiquette forms (8%) and emotional and expressive form (7%). As for the most typical bigrams of speech acts, they are the following: two consecutive representatives (22.35%), a regulatory form followed by a representative (6.93%), a representative and a regulatory form (6%), a valuative with a following representative (5.21%), a representative and a valuative judgment (4.77%), as well as two combinations of a directive with a representative (2.77% each). Besides, the article presents data on the occurrence of the most frequent pairs of speech acts at the subtype level. Here, the most frequent one is the sequence ʽquestionʼ+ʽanswerʼ, which covers 2.45%.
The book is intended for undergraduate and graduate students of the Higher School of Economics. Its main objective is developing academic skills, namely enriching students’ academic vocabulary, which is an integral part of their professional education. Being able to use appropriate academic vocabulary in writing is essential for this kind of activity.
Developing Academic Literacy correlates with the book Academic Vocabulary in Use by Michael McCarthy and Felicity O’Dell (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and can be used as a source of additional exercises to practice topics covered there. Out of 50 units presented in this book we have chosen 45 which are of particular importance for the context of the National Research University. However, each unit of the present book contains not only practical exercises but also a theoretical part explaining the use of studied lexical units. Thus, the book can be used independently. As each unit covers a different lexical topic, the units can be studied in any order.
The tasks are aimed at both recognizing the lexis (on its own and within short contexts) and using it. The exercises comprise such tasks as matching words with their definitions, synonyms, antonyms, completing sentences with appropriate words, matching parts of sentences. Special attention is paid to collocations in academic context. The illustrative examples have mostly been taken from the British National Corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English and monolingual English dictionaries.
The book can be used both in class and individually. The exercises are provided with the Key, which allows students to check their answers, and, thus, makes the book suitable for self-study purposes. The book is provided with the Resource bank, which consists of abstracts from academic articles. All the abstracts contain lexical units studied in the book and can be used as a source of additional exercises by a teacher or self-check material by a student.
The starting point of the study is the hypothesis of a discursive proximity of Church Slavonic and Christian religious discourse of the modern Russian language. Analysing lexical structure with quantitative corpus methods we show that the latter is closer to Church Slavonic than the mainstream modern Russian language. This can serve as a proof of the specificity of the register in question, an additional argument when deciding on its separate status. Research is based on the material of the Russian National Corpus, namely, the Church-Slavonic corpus, the Main corpus and the Subcorpus of church-and-theologу texts. Using the log-likelihood criterion and PCA visualizations, we reveal the body of lexemes in Russian texts that can be considered Slavonicisms (tserkovnoslavyanizmy) and show that the "distance" between the corpora can be measured differently if one takes into account adjectives, nouns and verbs separately.
Students' internet usage attracts the attention of many researchers in different countries. Differences in internet penetration in diverse countries lead us to ask about the interaction of medium and culture in this process. In this paper we present an analysis based on a sample of 825 students from 18 Russian universities and discuss findings on particularities of students' ICT usage. On the background of the findings of the study, based on data collected in 2008-2009 year during a project "A сross-cultural study of the new learning culture formation in Germany and Russia", we discuss the problem of plagiarism in Russia, the availability of ICT features in Russian universities and an evaluation of the attractiveness of different categories of ICT usage and gender specifics in the use of ICT.