How many schoolchildren today would claim Russian as their favorite subject? Why do Russian lessons at school often appear boring and too formal? Mechanical memorization of rules, the endless insertion of missing letters, and the completion of standard tasks fail to captivate the modern student. Is there an alternative?

Working with the Russian National Corpus when teaching humanities, such as literature, the Russian language, and history, can vividly illustrate that language is a living, evolving system with a past, present, and future. Students can assume the role of researchers, extracting definitions from the analysis of word usage, observing how the meaning of words evolves over time, and even predicting the spelling of new words.

Working with the RNC fosters and enhances:

• research skills
• functional literacy
• a deepened interest in language
• an appreciation of the history of the language
• proficiency in utliizing reference resources
• ability to analyze context
• a comprehensive understanding of how words function in prose and poetry

In the process of teaching the Russian language and literature for independent study, both at school and at home, you can use the educational corpus, the word at a glance and the exercises based on the texts of the corpus, as well as the teaching materials (in Russian) and the user's guide.