WHAT IS THE SIMPLIFIED NEWS?

The NCLRC Simplified News Webcasts are posted to the web twice monthly are also available by podcast subscription. They deliver a survey of the previous two weeks' news in simplified standard Russian and Arabic. Listeners of Voice of America's "Special English" broadcasts will recognize the slightly slower rate of speech and textual redundancy which characterize these webcasts.

SIMPLIFIED? WHAT? NON-AUTHENTIC?

During the Cold War, newscasts from both the Soviet Union and the Arabic media were a language teacher’s dream. The diction was slow and clear, and the message was predictable and redundant.

After the fall of communism, Russian talk radio (TV too) became hard. Diction doubled in speed and became slurry and the message lost its predictability. Similar changes took place on Arabic language radio and TV, especially with the appareance of Western-style newscasting through satellite networks such as Al Jazeera. Students trying to acquire listening comprehension skills found themselves jumping from teacher talk to rapid-fire audio with no intermediate bridge.

In 2003, with sponsorship from the National Capital Language Resource Center (NCLRC), I initiated a bi-monthly webcast called the News in Simplified Russian. The news is slowed to mimic the tempo of earlier times. Complicated syntax is simplified. At the same time, the language presented is kept within the bounds of what a native speaker would accept as real Russian. In fall 2008, Arabic was added, for which I also serve as executive producer.

The twice-monthly webcast is accompanied by language scaffolding targeted at the ACTFL Intermediate Mid listener whose goal is to arrive at the Advanced level for flow-of-speech listening. The interactive pre- and post-script exercises do not require that students type the target language; words and their endings can be cut and pasted.

During the first year of operation, I selected the news items, wrote the exercises, and had Natalia Bessergeneva, a native speaker of Russian in the GW Graduate School of Education, read the texts. The following year, Natalia took on nearly all the responsibilities for the project: she scanned the web for news items in Russian, adapted the texts, and recorded the news. She also learned the JavaScript necessary to produce her own exercises.

The exercise writer and the voice of the webcats is Rana Kanaan. The Simplified Arabic News scaffolding is Quia-based.

The success of the project is obvious in the monthly number of hits — between 8000 and 16000 during the academic year. More telling is the number of e-mails I, as project supervisor, get if we are late in posting.

TheThe NCLRC Simplified News Webcasts serve both third-year level courses and a large number of individual learners from all parts of the world.

KUDOS

Here is a bit of what our listeners have told us:

I just wanted to say thank you for the simplified Russian news broadcasts you provide as a project of the National Capital Language Resource Center. I am a first year undergraduate studying Russian at the University of Edinburgh and I find these broadcasts together with the vocab and transcripts invaluable. I had previously tried listening to Russian radio via the internet but found the speech simply too fast to really get much of benefit from them. Having spent the last two weeks doing one or two news items a day I find my listening skills have picked up enormously already.

I saw the notice about the return of Simplified News in the Winter ACTR newsletter, I tried it out and I am just delighted with it. This is exactly what I need, and for exactly the reasons you state, for my third-year students at Albany. Thank you for creating and maintaining this news service. Everything works wonderfully, The audio is wonderful.

I just wanted to thank everyone involved with putting this site together. It is very evident how much work goes into creating these webcasts and I wanted to let you know (which I would hope all do) that it is not unappreciated. Even my Russian girlfriend gives a stamp of approval as a study aide for her aspiring Russian-speaking boyfriend, which is something she doesn't do often! In short, thanks a lot and keep up the great work. Spacibo opyat' iz Kalifornii.

I just want to compliment you on the wonderful site that you're responsible for - the simplified Russian news. I've been chipping away at Russian for more than a decade now (mostly on my own) and continue to make small advances. I've just discovered the russian webcasts and really appreciate the work that has gone into them. It really is fabulous - the nicely paced voice, the script, the keywords, the couple of comprehension questions. Please keep it up! I hope that you have the drive & inclination to keep them going. Kind regards, Shane (from Victoria in Australia).

What is there is great! I used them for listening activities in a course on Russian detective fiction, and will incorporate them into a Russian media course as well. Regards and thanks for your work on these.

Et cetera.

And we heard from our listeners when we're a bit late! (Our exercise writer had just given birth.)

Will you be putting up any more Russian news broadcasts on the George Washington website? We were using the broadcasts in our Russian class and are wondering when the next one would be put online. The website states that one is put up about every two weeks but it now almost a month since one was posted.

OTHER LANGUAGES

With the addition of Arabic this year, we are now looking foward to adding other languages in the near future with Chinese on the drawing board.

A BIT OF HISTORY

The News in Simplified Russian is an outgrowth of some of the first work ever done in listening comprehension at the university level for flow-of-speech newscasts. In 1984, before the Internet age, I had native speakers record Soviet news items in the Language Center’s studio, around which I wrote scaffolding. That in turned served as the basis for some of the first Russian listening materials to be distributed by ACTFL (1987-1988).

At the same time, Middlebury College funded a project to create similar exercises based on Russian flow-of-speech television newscasts — at a time, in the mid-1980s — when the only access to Russian newscasts was through a polar-synchronized dish costing about $100,000 in today’s dollars.

The Middlebury project led to an Annenberg/CPB grant to produce twice-monthly exercise sets to be distributed by e-mail (in 1987!) — the Listening Comprehension Exercise Network. LCEN exercises were based on every other Monday’s prime-time Soviet (Vremya) newscast. In 1987-1989 it served up to 2000 students and represented a number of technical firsts:

• the first regularized transmission of Cyrillic through e-mail for educational purposes
• the first regular use of Russian television broadcasts across a number of universities
• the first mass distribution of listening comprehension exercises the day after a recorded broadcast

The LCEN project continued in 1988-1989, with undergraduate students Michael Boyd and Anna Connolly monitoring and recording the news and writing the exercises. (Anna Connolly went on to work on the Russian version of Sesame Street. Michael Boyd now teaches Russian in Italy.)

In 1991-1992, the George Washington Elliott School of International Affairs picked up funding for the LCEN project and asked me to expand it to additional languages. By hiring advanced students in paid internships, I was able to expand LCEN (no longer dependent on e-mail, but on web postings) to five languages: Russian, Spanish, French, Italian, and Chinese.

The original LCEN exercises from the late 1980s became the basis for a manual on listening comprehension published by Ohio State University Slavic Materials in 1991.

Similar work is now part and parcel of the SCOLA packages. I am proud to have been one of the first to have traveled that route.