Advancing in Russian Through Through Narration by Aneta Pavlenko and Victoria Driagina is a new CALPER publication for teachers of Russian. The book focuses on two important aspects of advanced language proficiency, namely narrative and conceptual proficiency.

Narrative proficiency refers to the ability to tell narratives that are similar to those of native speakers of Russian. Conceptual proficiency refers to the ability of making the same conceptual distinctions as native speakers of Russian do.

The authors’ discussion singles out five areas of Russian language knowledge central to the acquisition of narrative and conceptual proficiency. These are “tense and aspect,” “the use of verbs of motion,” “aspects of narrative structure,”, “emotion vocabulary,” and “identity terms.”

The book is available on a CD in PDF format. More information is available at Advancing in Russian Through Narration.