As the global economy becomes more integrated, incorporating international experiences into college curricula becomes increasingly desirable for American students and their counterparts abroad. This paper describes one model for creating an international, Web-based, distance-learning classroom that can be used as a guide for those who might wish to pursue similar endeavors. Our replicated experiences teaching a sociology course on social control, twice under slightly different conditions, provide the basis for identifying the conditions and practices that optimize the goals of providing a forum for international education and enhancing reading and writing skills. A content analysis of the online Student-Led Discussions provides evidence that cross-national knowledge and understanding can be enhanced in this learning environment. Enrolling students from the United States, Belarus, Russia, and Australia, our course demonstrates how instructors can create a successful virtual classroom that truly encircles the globe.

Background: Impairments in spatial processing show themselves not only in gnosis and praxis, but also in the language domain. Such deficit is a characteristic feature of so-called semantic aphasia. The impaired comprehension of semantically reversible constructions in those patients can be explained by a disorder of the common spatial neuropsychological factor grounded in the temporal-parietal-occipital (TPO) regions of the brain. Aims: The aim of the present study was to experimentally test the possibility that individuals with semantic aphasia experience specific difficulties in extracting spatial relations from a linguistic form and rely instead on basic sensorimotor stereotypes to interpret reversible linguistic constructions. Methods & Procedures: Six individuals with semantic aphasia, 12 people with motor aphasia, 12 people with sensory aphasia, and 12 non-brain-damaged individuals performed a sentence-picture matching task; all participants were native speakers of Russian. Two types of reversible sentences were tested, each representing a direct and an inverted word order: prepositional (The boy is putting the bag in the box vs. The boy is putting in the box the bag) and instrumental (The grandmother is covering the scarf with the hat vs. The grandmother is covering with the hat the scarf). Irreversible sentences (The boy is putting the apple in the bag) served as control stimuli. Outcomes & Results: Each group of participants performed better on irreversible than on reversible sentences. Within reversible sentences, an interaction between word order and construction type was found in individuals with semantic aphasia only. They performed more accurately in prepositional constructions with direct word order and in instrumental constructions with inverted word order-both are related to sensorimotor stereotypes reflecting interaction with objects in the real world. Although no such clear dissociation was found in other aphasia types, correlation analysis revealed the same effect in some participants with motor and sensory aphasia. Conclusions: The findings confirm the importance of situational context for linguistic processing. First, if knowledge of the real world supports the unique interpretation of grammatical markers, it enhances processing in all tested cohorts of participants. Second, people with semantic aphasia consistently use sensorimotor stereotypes to compensate for their linguistic deficits. Since this was also found in some participants with other aphasia types, such a sensorimotor strategy might depend not on the damage to TPO areas as such, but on the intactness and overuse of left premotor regions suggested to be critical for motor and symbolic sequential processing.

Описан долговременный проект по изучению современного состояния аляскинского варианта русского языка с особым вниманием к результатам последних экспедиций 2014 и 2017 гг. Исследование аляскинского извода русского языка дополняет мозаичную картину русского языкового разнообразия. Так как данный вариант русского языка находится в крайне угрожающем состоянии (осталось менее 20 носителей в возрасте восьмидесяти и более лет), то его документирование, описание условий формирования, а также прослеживание его истории на протяжении более двухсот лет существования является важной и насущной задачей.

From the end of September 2020 to November 2021, the Year of Germany was held in the Russian Federation. At present, while summing up its results, it seems only relevant to do some work on the study of the multifaceted ethnolinguistic community of Russian Germans, especially its Moscow diaspora. In this article, two key points are considered: the history of representatives of the community to the present day and the empirical part of the study that analyzes indepth interviews of respondents from among young Russian Germans under the age of 35, living in Moscow. The main purpose of the work was to find out what state this ethno-linguistic community is in today: to consider the problem of self-identification of its members, to trace their native language level and interest in studying and preserving the cultural heritage of their ancestors. The study of various sources has shown that throughout the history of the life of Germans in our country, the attitude towards them has repeatedly changed: from positive to hostile, to more neutral; from praising this community as that of competent specialists and innovators in many fields to persecution and repression during the first half of the twentieth century, and, eventually, refusal to be recognized as a full-fledged community. As a result of these actions on the part of the Soviet government, the community of Russian Germans found themselves in a state of identity crisis facing the problem of the gradual disappearance of their linguistic and cultural landscape. Interestingly, the interviews compiled on the basis of a form created within the framework of the “Languages of Moscow” project helped to find out that in Moscow, historically one of the most important centers of initial settlement of Germans in Russia, their community is not visible any more due to the low level of presence of native Moscow Germans. At the same time, there is a chance for its growth since many respondents consider it to be important to pass on their rich cultural and linguistic heritage to their descendants and continue to develop it on the territory of Russia. So, we believe that the current work has a potential for further and deeper research of the ethno-linguistic community, in particular with the focus on the diaspora of Russian Germans who emigrated to Germany (namely rusacks).

This paper presents the results of a pilot field study of the Russian language of a group of East Siberian old settlers in the context of their ethnic and cultural history and their role in Russian expansion eastward, including Alaska between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From a linguistic perspective, the regional features of the old settlers’ Russian language testify to the cultural and historical processes that involved various groups of the Russianspeaking population of Eastern Siberia. This paper aims at comparing these linguistic materials to the data on the Russian language of Alaska found by the authors, which may help clarify the historical processes that shaped the Russian linguistic and cultural landscape of Alaska, the only overseas Russian region. Linguistic data from Siberia are checked against those of Alaskan Russian – a language of intercultural communication in Alaska from the beginning of the Russian America period (mid-eighteenth century) and through to the mid-twentieth century. The research on Alaskan Russian is based on the variant spoken in Ninilchik (Kenai Peninsula) that has survived until the present time. The lexical, grammatical, and phonological features of Ninilchik Russian demonstrate both contact features of this idiom and its peculiarities as a variant of Russian. This description is followed by data from the language of the so-called “teamster old settlers” from the Pokrovsk region in Yakutia. It is known that Russian old settlers from Siberia, and especially teamster old settlers, made up a considerable part among the Siberian Russians who were coming to Alaska in the nineteenth century. However, drawing on a comparison of the two sets of linguistic data, the authors conclude that the dialect they speak is quite different from the varieties of Russian spoken in Alaska.