Innovation in Language Learning

Background: Among the variety of modern distance-online courses of Russian as a foreign language, it is important to mention the special course "Conversations with Russians" (A1-A2) posted on the portal "Education in Russian". For courses of levels of Russian as a foreign language A1 and A2, video fragments from the same interviews are presented, but tasks are of varying complexity that corresponds to the level of knowledge of the students. One cannot deny that the complexity of the material is high for beginners. The aim of the work is to study the lexical composition and grammatical structure of texts, their comparison with the accepted standards recommended for a specific language level.

Methods: During the first stage of our research, we used quantitative methods: determination of the size of text, the speech rate, the ratio of familiar and unfamiliar words, Flesch–Kincaid grade level. During the second stage of our research, we assessed the syntactic complexity of the sentences and the adequacy of the given tasks.

Results: The average size of a text at the level A1 (102 words instead of 120-150 words) is a little less than it is recommended for this level in standards. This fact is compensated by the high percentage of unfamiliar words (11, 3% instead of 1%). The speech rate exceeds the standard level A1 (160 syllables/a minute instead of 120 to 140 syllables/ a minute). On the A2 level the size of an average text is even lower (81 words instead of 170-200 words) which is compensated by a high level of unfamiliar words (3.1 percent instead of 1.5 percent) and the complexity of the proposed tasks, the purpose of which is a research the specific information in a fragment.

Conclusions: It is important that during the course a student can show his contextual guess in order to understand the most important in the text: what is a speaker talking about, who is talking, what is a main idea of an interview. Thus, such courses help to prevent the language barrier. Criteria of level A2 are closer to the standards.