Author Archives: uctqs28

Hello everyone,

Welcome to our class blog for Essay in Russian!

Here you will find examples of some of the essays written by UCL SSEES undergraduate students studying Russian as part of their degree.

The Essay in Russian module is an elective module of the Russian degree programme and aims to develop general transferable writing skills as well as essay writing in Russian. The content of the course is developed using both Process and Result oriented approaches to teaching writing. The module sets out to allow students to become independent and competent writers and give them the skills needed to produce coherent and cohesive written content in Russian.

Over the course of the 2018/19 academic year we covered four different types of essays: argumentative, narrative, reasoning, and comparative, plus a “review writing” – to all of which you can find sample essays in this blog.

Within the framework of the module, students were asked to create an individual online writer’s blog using the WordPress blogging platform where they published some of their work (essays or other posts). This was done as part of formative assessment and on an entirely voluntary basis.

Four different types of digital technologies were used to deliver this module and blogs were one part of them. The use of blogs was suggested to students in order to facilitate the idea of writing for audiences and to build their skills and confidence when writing. Using blogs also aimed to teach students to be accountable for the content they upload publicly and to serve as a tool of reflection on students’ writing process and progress. It also functioned as a motivational booster letting students see how they have improved over the course of the year. Moreover, in the future students can also use the blogs as Language Portfolios as evidence of their language proficiency to others, such as potential employers or other academic institutions.

I am very grateful to all my students who have contributed essay samples for this blog and who have provided continual valuable feedback on how to improve the module for future students. As a result of this successful pilot module and the feedback given by students this module has been refined, amended and improved and next academic year will run under the title Writing, Editing and Blogging in Russian. Thank you to all who helped to shape this module. Your responsive and positive attitude and collaboration is very much appreciated.

I hope you will enjoy the samples you read and will celebrate the achievements of our students!

With fondest regards,

Maria Sibiryakova (m.sibiryakova@ucl.ac.uk)