This textbook (Russian: From Intermediate to Advanced) can be used in the third and fourth years of college, or, if described in proficiency terms, will take students from the intermediate to the advanced level of proficiency on the ACTFL scale (or 1-2 on the ILR scale). The main objective is to help students develop all four skills (speaking, reading, listening, writing) and to further enhance their cultural knowledge to a point where they can “engage in conversation in a clearly participatory manner in order to communicate information on autobiographical topics, as well as topics of community, national, or international interest” (ACTFL Guidelines, 2012 –Speaking), “can understand the main idea and supporting details of authentic narrative and descriptive texts” (ACTFL Guidelines, 2012 – Reading), and “can understand the main ideas and most supporting details in connected discourse on a variety of general interest topics, such as news stories, explanations, instructions, anecdotes, or travelogue descriptions” (ACTFL Guidelines, 2012 – Listening).
The textbook is innovative in its approach to materials presentation: it creates a learning environment that is similar to real life in that all modalities are interwoven. To this end, tasks and assignments are designed with the following questions in mind: How do native speakers use these texts? What are the real life purposes? For example, in real life, a native speaker listens to a news item, then reads the same information in print, then and discusses it either informally or formally. Our approach is to provide students with tasks that mimic this process while also offering them scaffolding to ensure that the task can be completed. We pay particular attention to developing students’ ability to understand and produce complex discourse by helping them to become thoroughly familiar with, for example, complex syntactical constructions in the interpersonal, interpretive and presentational modes.
O. Kagan, A. Kudyma, F. Miller