Olga O'Laoghaire (Manakova) Evgeny D. Patarakin Valery Rudenko Galina Guzilova
The paper present the joint e-mail project between the students of English at the University of Pereslavl and students of Russian at Trinity College, Dublin.
The first stage UP students was to learn to use modern telecommunications media - e-mail, Internet, WWW. Their first assignment is to create a map of their home town/city, with the most interesting places (from their point of view) marked on it.
They then create a separate page about each of these places, with text and pictures and/or photographs. These pages are attached to the main map. Thus, the user of this map will be able to "travel" around the city and to get information about different places. The first stage for TCD students was to learn to use computers - many of them have never used a computer before. Another trick to learn was to use Cyrillic's - to understand the difference between keyboard driver and font, to switch between two different keyboards, etc. The first assignment was very simple - the students had to write a couple of paragraphs about themselves. During next weeks we learned to use e-mail program Eudora Light and were preparing questions for our correspondents in Pereslavl. In TCD we were interested in integrating computers into the curriculum, namely into the course of spoken Russian. The computer classes were planned in a way that would allow the students to use the words and expressions they have just learned in their language classes. Thus, the questions were based on the topics covered in the Russian language classes. Due to technical problems the students could not receive the texts from Russia directly or surf the net themselves, so the teacher had to perform some conversions on the texts from Russia, so that the texts should be available for the students to read. It must be said, that these texts were really an inspiration for us, and students at TCD were really impressed with the high level of use of technology in University of Pereslavl.
The students become columnists in a virtual newspaper and are writing for a virtual newspaper: "Dublin News" in Pereslavl and "Pereslavl News" or "Russian News" in Dublin. Russian students put questions (in English) to the students in TCD, and use their replies (in English) to create pages with text and photographs. Photographs and pictures should be sent only in reply to a request (So that the students would have an opportunity to practice questions and requests). Another possible activity is to send from Dublin a description of a building (not too complex architecturally) and ask the Russian students to draw the picture according to the description. In the same way the students from TCD get information about Russia, but in this case communication is in Russian.
In process of implementing the project we decided that it would be both interesting for the students and useful for activation of the new vocabulary to ask questions about everyday student life: what means of transportation do the students use, what are the favorite pastimes, what are the problems, etc.
The two groups put the virtual newspapers on the net, create links between two sites and have a discussion of the project. The questions that we would like to discuss with our students are: "Among all the things you've learnt about Russia (or Ireland) through this project, what has surprised you most? What has come as surprise in the description of your country by your partners in the project?" We believe, it will be most interesting to have this discussion in real-time and to place then the brief transcript on the WWW.