Interview with William Comer. Part 1: Teaching Reading

We interview Doctor William Comer, Professor of Russian and Director of the Russian Flagship Program at Portland State University. Dr. Comer has published numerous articles in national journals including the Slavic and East European Journal, Russian Language Journal and Foreign Language Annals. His pedagogical edition of Viktoria Tokareva's short story A Day without Lying (Slavica, 2008) was awarded the prize for Best Book in Language Pedagogy by American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages in 2010. In August 2009 he won the University of Kansas W.T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence. He is co-author of Mezhdu nami (=Between you and me), an online, open-access textbook for elementary Russian. At Portland State he teaches courses in Russian language, literature and culture, and directs the Russian Language Flagship Program. The conversation comes in two parts. In this part of the conversation podcast host Izolda Savenkova and her guest are discussing approaches to teaching reading. In the second part they focus on learning and teaching grammar as well as Doctor Comer's views on our field in general.