Russian: Russian Pronunciation Wkshop

See Schedule of Courses for specific titles.

Open to degree and PACE students

Are you feeling intimidated when speaking Russian? Do you think your Russian pronunciation needs to be improved? Then this class is for you! The workshop was designed to improve students’ PRONUNCIATION (i.e., to improve your oral communication skills by minimizing an accent). The course will provide comprehensive instructions (pronunciation rules and intonation patterns) and intensive practice (listening/repeating, reading, speaking) on Russian pronunciation (phonetics) such as vowel reduction, hard/soft and voiced/unvoiced consonants, consonants clusters, combinations of vowel, etc. using primarily authentic Russian materials. Therefore, the course will be very useful for those students who want/need to improve their pronunciation in order to sound like a native Russian speaker. This class will also acquaint you with specific Russian cultural norms of oral communication (conversational etiquette, word choice, common rules of non-verbal communication, etc.) so you will feel more confident speaking in public using the targeted language – Russian. We will strengthen your pronunciation through classroom instructions, songs, poems, ‘tongue twisters’, native Russian speakers’ recordings, and transcription work on phonetics patterns. Students will memorize and recite poems, dialogues, and ‘tongue twisters’ in order to increase their oral proficiency (pronunciation) toward meaningful and accurate communication and increase their listening comprehension, which is heavily affected by pronunciation. Thus, this is not a grammar or a vocabulary course per se. The focus and the main goal of the course is to improve your PRONUNCIATION i.e., to overcome pronunciation and intonation difficulties and mistakes typical for native English speakers.

Improve Russian pronunciation (speak clearly and confidently) Develop skills of phonetic perception and comprehension of Russian oral language/speech. Become more comfortable with spontaneous, spoken Russian. Gain more confidence in public speaking specifically in Russian. Improve overall language proficiency level (speaking, reading, listening comprehension). Become more culturally competent.  Acquire/expand active and passive vocabulary.

Attendance and Participation 20% Homework (recordings) 40% Weekly Dictations 10% Mid-term Exam (audio recordings) 15% Final Exam (audio recordings) 15%