Moscow City University created Russia’s first electronic textbook on the Korean language
New Delhi, 04th November 2022. The history of the Korean language or Hangul as it is called in Korea dates back to the middle of the XV century. In Russia, it began to be studied in the late Ð¥IÐ¥ century, and in the ХХI century, Moscow City University published the country’s first electronic textbook in this language.
Lyudmila Voronina, assistant professor at MCU’s Institute of Foreign Languages, received the first of three patents for Korean spelling in 2014, studied many digital English and Korean-language teaching tools, translated five volumes of “My Korean” into electronic format with help from “Smart Life” programmers, and began creating an electronic textbook whose essence lies in three characteristics: interactivity, hypertextuality and polymodality.
Interactivity is needed to reflect the progress in electronic penmanship and to ease the effort that beginners have to make while drawing letters in ink, which overstrains the muscles of the hand at first sight. And students have to write 40 letters, 100 times for each letter and join them together to form syllables.
“I decided to optimize the efforts, so the textbook is presented on a tablet. The stylus allows you to draw letters endlessly, and the teacher can see what stage the student is at in real time. The transition to the next stage is possible only when the letter is drawn correctly”, – the textbook creator shared.
Hypertextuality allows us to move instantly from one section of the textbook to another. For example, touching one of the letters (or syllables) in the content with a stylus or finger redirects the learner to the page of a particular exercise. Polymodality, in turn, allows the formation of graphic skills simultaneously with auditory skills: in the training field of each letter, there is an icon. The student hears the pronunciation by clicking on it.
It is worth noting that over the past three years, the “Oriental Studies and Africana Studies” field at Moscow City University has become popular, and the number of students increased by 25%. This is due to the rapid development of the economies of Eastern countries, which makes it attractive to study, the Korean language.
In addition to the electronic textbook for students, teachers of the Institute of Foreign Languages at MCU are creating a monograph and a textbook for teachers, which will focus not only on the theoretical foundations of teaching foreign languages using electronic textbooks but also on the technology of learning with it.
All this information has been given in a press release.