In order to learn more about Russia’s cultural capital and Russian literary figures while expanding their knowledge of the Russian language, Second-Year Russian students at Colby College in the fall semester of 2015 wrote their own, scaffolded biographies of famous Russian writers from Saint Petersburg.
An additional goal of the project was to create culturally accurate biographies that will be accessible for intermediate-level students of Russian.
I used a biography of Alexander Pushkin that I wrote as a template for the assignment, which was broken into 5 sections, each with targeted vocabulary and grammatical structures. Please see the detailed assignments and classroom activities below.