The site offers digitized clips from Russian films and supporting materials, such as exercises, glossary, and cultural comments.
Type of Material:
Collection
Recommended Uses:
Best used with an instructor who would be helping with navigation of the site and choosing appropriate video files and exercises. Could be used as a supplement to a textbook for novice learners, but may be helpful for enriching knowledge in conversational Russian and culture by more advanced learners.
Technical Requirements:
Media Player
Identify Major Learning Goals:
To enrich vocabulary and knowledge in Russian culture, to develop listening and speaking skills, as well as practice grammar patterns.
Target Student Population:
Mostly targets novice learners of Russian but could be of interest to more advanced students.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:
Good computer navigation skills, access to the Internet with preferably broad-band connection, Cyrillic font, RealAudio Player and QuickTime Player and plugins.
Content Quality
Rating:
Strengths:
Provides a wide variety of digitized films of different genres and forms. Films are chunked into short excepts, which makes it easier for novice students to comprehend texts. Helpful supporting materials include glossary, transcripts, cultural remarks, and exercises which target a topic, speech pattern or/and grammar presented in a film except.
Instructors may find it useful to read a journal which authors kept while using these electronic materials for the first time. The journal provides comments and recommendations that could help to avoid methodological and logistic problems one may encounter when using the site to teach a group of novice learners of Russian.
Concerns:
The site is not easy to navigate. If no guidance is offered, it takes time to figure out where the supplementary exercises are and what one should be exercising. There is no link from each page that would lead to the list of all films: one needs to press back button several times.
Major pages are split into four frames, which is both helpful and problematic. While having a glossary, transcript, and video itself on one page could be helpful for comprehension, it could be distracting from viewing/listening. Moreover, because developing a listening skill does not necessarily require full comprehension of the text, it could be useful to include exercises that could be performed without the help of transcripts and glossary.
Some extracts are too short (Ex., The Mushroom Man) and it seems longer dialogues could be included. I dont like the selection of some extracts seems rather negative attitude to life (no hope, small salaries, etc.). As some films are presented only in several short extracts, they seem disorganized and disconnection to each other. The vocabulary and speech patters practiced are very varied, and some do not belong to frequently used words and phrases, and therefore could be unhelpful for novice students.
The design of the site is visually unattractive.
Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool
Rating:
Strengths:
The site is best used with an experienced instructor who would guide students when they navigate the site and do assignments. It provides a varied and interesting selection of short films and film excepts that could serve as an introduction to Russian cinematography and increase students motivation to study Russian language and culture. Supporting materials, when used appropriately, could be effective for developing listening and speaking skills, as well as practicing grammar in context. Digitized form of video materials make it possible to repeat short extracts several times, which along with transcripts and glossary ensure full comprehension.
Concerns:
None
Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty
Rating:
Strengths:
Downloading video files may take a lot of time, however the site offers three formats for downloading large video, small video or just audio.
Concerns:
Navigation of the site is not very user-friendly.
Other Issues and Comments:
None
Creative Commons:
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