Russian as a Heritage Language: From Research to Classroom Application

Russian as a Heritage Language: From Research to Classroom Applications brings together linguistically and pedagogically oriented research traditions in a comprehensive review of current Russian heritage language (HL) studies.

Divided into three parts, the collection offers a variety of frameworks and approaches spanning research on HL speakers’ linguistic and pragmatic competence, literacy development, and sociocultural characteristics of Russian in diaspora. Presenting a wide range of new empirical findings, the volume explores topics at the forefront of HL studies, from assessment of HL learners’ linguistic competence and language attitudes to research on communities and institutional affordances impacting HL acquisition and maintenance. Each chapter connects current research with specific classroom applications, presenting Russian as a global language in various sociopolitical and majority-language contexts.

Combining methodological rigor with theoretical insights across diverse areas of language study, Russian as a Heritage Language advances the field of HL pedagogy and serves as essential reading for HL educators and researchers as well as for linguists studying bilingualism.

Olesya Kisselev is Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of South Carolina, USA. Kisselev’s research expertise lies in the areas of heritage and second language acquisition, language pedagogy and learner corpus research. Her scholarly contributions include research papers and book chapters on linguistic aspects of learner language varieties as well as on language pedagogy.

Oksana Laleko is Associate Professor and Director of Linguistics at the State University of New York at New Paltz, USA, and a book reviews editor of the Heritage Language Journal. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on formal linguistic, cognitive, and sociolinguistic dimensions of heritage language bilingualism.

Irina Dubinina is Professor of Russian and Director of the Russian Language Program in the Department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature at Brandeis University, USA. Her research focuses on pragmatics of heritage Russian and heritage language pedagogy, which are the topics of her recent publications. Dubinina is an experienced instructor of Russian as a second and a heritage language.