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Mathematicon: A corpus-based platform for teachers and students of RFL
Teaching mathematics to students who speak Russian as a foreign language (RFL) can be a complicated task. Mathematical formulas can be verbalized in Russian in various ways; however, RFL textbooks do not cover all of them. This chapter explores the challenges of teaching L2 learners of Russian the academic discipline of mathematics and offers possible solutions. One such solution is Mathematicon – a new corpus resource that allows users to quickly determine how a formula or an equation is verbalized in Russian by searching for expressions in annotated transcripts of recorded lectures. Created for foreign students attending mainstream math courses with Russian as a medium of instruction, Mathematicon is also helpful to linguists interested in the grammatical features of the academic language of mathematics – “math discourse.” Numerous examples throughout the chapter illustrate how teachers and students can use Mathematicon. This tool allows teachers to see all possible verbal expressions of a mathematical concept, to evaluate their frequency, semantic features, and collocative restrictions. This information can help teachers prepare materials for math lessons in RFL and customize them based on students’ L2 Russian proficiency and learning goals. Students can use Mathematicon as a dictionary when they need to verbalize math notations. They can also access these expressions in context, embedded in authentic Russian sentences. The tool allows registered students to check their knowledge with automatically generated tests based on their search history.