RuTOC: A Corpus of Online Lessons in Russian as a Foreign Language

The paper describes the project of RuTOC – a corpus of online lessons in Russian as a foreign language – and presents the first results of corpus analysis. The corpus RuTOC presented in the article is a special type of corpus, specifically, a corpus of classroom academic or educational discourse. Such collections of text data serve as a basis of discursive and sociolinguistic studies of classroom communication and investigation of the second language acquisition and make a certain contribution to the development of the pedagogical theo- ry and practice. The relevance of the study stems from the fact that for the first time it collected, pre-processed and marked samples of classroom communication in Russian language classes; the corpus has created opportunities for evidence-based research in the theory and practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language. In addition, the relevance of the study is related to the increased need to study the peculiarities of online language lear- ning during the pandemic. The paper describes the process of creating the corpus, which includes the following steps: 1) collecting video recordings of RFL classes; 2) developing a standard for transcribing video recordings and creating a collection of transcripts; 3) developing a corpus marking system; 4) corpus data marking; 5) post-processing and analysis of the corpus. Currently, the corpus consists of 40 transcripts of lessons with a total duration of more than 56 hours and a total volume of 236,400 words; the first version of the corpus includes lessons in the Russian lan- guage at different educational levels, from the pre-university to the master»s program, at three Russian univer- sities. The article presents some difficulties and peculiarities of the transcription and marking of materials and the first results of a corpus analysis aimed at identifying the differences between student talk and teacher talk in RFL classes. It has been found that online RFL classes are generally characterized by high interactivity, understood as the ratio of conversational turns to total speech amount; at the same time, there is a significant imbalance between the amount of teacher talk and student talk. The paper concludes with a suggestion of promising directions for research on the basis of RuTOC