MACAWS (Multilingual Academic Corpus of Assignments – Writing and Speech) is looking for teachers interested in implementing their corpus-based activities in their Russian language classrooms.
Eligible participants:* Are teaching Russian in 2024
* Are interested in implementing corpus-based activities, especially spoken corpus activities
* Are available for an introductory workshop prior to implementing activities
If you join our research, we are pleased to offer a $25 gift card to participating instructors and $5 gift cards to their students. If interested, please contact Shelley Staples (slstaples@arizona.edu) or Valentina Vinokurova (vvinokurova@arizona.edu) to learn more.
What is MACAWS?
MACAWS (Multilingual Academic Corpus of Assignments – Writing and Speech) is a corpus of learner texts from two foreign language programs, Portuguese and Russian, built at the University of Arizona. Currently, we have 1539 Russian texts (219,515 words), and our corpus is growing!
Where can I find MACAWS?
MACAWS can be accessed via an online interface. To view the corpus, you will need to request a login and password on the interface webpage free of charge.
How can I use MACAWS in my classroom?
MACAWS has a variety of applications in the classroom, such as:
- noticing activities to help students recognize grammatical or lexical patterns
- awareness raising to help students understand features of spoken Russian such as fillers, discourse markers, and active listening strategies
- building confidence through exposure to authentic texts produced by other learners
For detailed information on how to use MACAWS in the classroom, please visit our website.