The Aspect in Russian MediaBook: Material Designs and Learner Styles Laura A. Janda University of North Carolina janda@unc.edu www.unc.edu/~lajanda

Overview Purpose of the project Target audiences Collaborators Funding Demonstration Beta-Testing Future plans

Encoding TIME “Jeg gir stort sett faen i rom, men jeg har problemer med tid”. --Erlend Loe

Purpose of the Project To facilitate learning how perfective and imperfective aspect encode time in Russian Challenges: Aspect in Russian is typologically unusual: it is distinguished in all forms and tenses and imperfective is the unmarked member A metaphorical model highlights parallels between the properties of matter in space and the properties of events in time, but doesn’t work in book format

Purpose of the Project, cont’d. Objective: To provide a virtual space for students to conduct experiments and connect what they know about the physical properties of matter to the temporal properties of events

Target Audiences Students in traditional Russian courses Alumni of military and government programs who are required to maintain their Russian Instructors Independent learners

Collaborators Institute for Science Learning at UNC- Chapel Hill (http://isl.unc.edu) Designer, programmers, educational materials specialist Slavic and East European Language Resource Center (http://www.seelrc.org) Workshops, professional network, student assistants

Funding National Science Foundation Educational Materials Development Grant 2004 $75K Creation of about 1/10 of total project, plus creation of templates for total project

Demonstration http://isl.unc.edu/russian/ainr Introduction Chapter 2: Matter Matters Module 1: Properties of Matter Shape Convertibility

Beta-Testing March 2005 beta-testing with more than 300 students at 19 institutions: 15 colleges/universities (includes control groups) 2 high schools West Point and US Naval Academy Pre-test, use of materials, post-test, survey, focus group, back-end data collection

Future Plans Analyze data from beta-testing phase Apply for National Science Foundation National Dissemination grant ($0.5M June 2005) Complete full project