Maria Shardakova: Cognitive Science Program: Indiana University Bloomington

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Maria Shardakova

Maria Shardakova

Associate Professor, Slavic and Eastern European Languages Cultures

Director, Russian Language Program

maalshar@indiana.edu
GA 4042
(812) 855-3370
Office Hours

M-F

By Appointment Only

Education

Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College, 2005

Research interests

Started out with research into second-language pragmatics, I have become more and more interested in spontaneous conversational humor and other forms of linguistic creativity. I have published several articles on second-language and cross-cultural humor, exploring connections between linguistic development and playful practices, as well as identity construction and the audience's perception of second-language humor and humorists. Currently, I am working on a book-length projected titled “No Laughing Matter: The Reinvention of Russia through Humor.”

Current projects: I am working on several teaching and pedagogy related projects. Two of them are collaborative initiatives supported by the IU Scholarship of Teaching and Learning grant and by the CIBER grant. For the first project, Sofiya Asher and I are developing online interactive assessment instruments for measuring learners’ progress in intermediate-level Russian courses. The second project is carried out under the auspices of the IU Center for Language Excellence and in collaboration with the Kelley School of Business. The goal of this project is to formulate guidelines for teaching business across the foreign language curriculum. Also as a part of my work with the IU Center for Language Excellence, I am developing a series of workshops on pedagogy, assessment, and research.

Professional Experience

Elementary Russian
Intermediate Russian
Advanced Intermediate Russian
Language of Modernism
Second language teaching methods
Contemporary Russian culture
Using Canvas to create assessment activities
Assessing students’ oral proficiency in the classroom and beyond
Connecting research and foreign language classroom
Assessing learners’ sociocultural proficiency

Representative publications

American Learners’ Comprehension of Russian Textual Humor (2016)
MARIA SHARDAKOVA
Modern Language Journal, 100 (2),

Abstract: Over the past decade, second language (L2) humor has attracted scholarly attention as both a means and a goal of L2 development. Much of this research, however, has focused on oral communication, whereas virtually no studies address humor as an aspect of reading comprehension. This exploratory study combines these two areas of inquiry, examining how L2 learners of Russian negotiate textual humor. In particular, the study addresses the role of textual properties (genre and humorousness), and the effects of proficiency on learners' ability to apprehend and appreciate textual humor. The findings suggest that learner comprehension is dynamic and often partial (cf. Bell, ), depending on familiarity with genre conventions and linguistic devices signaling humorous intent. The study also found that different stages of humor comprehension required discrete sets of knowledge: Detection, for example, relies on L2 linguistic knowledge, whereas understanding hinges largely on native cultural beliefs. Comparison of both groups suggested that the differences between learners and native speakers were both quantitative and qualitative. The role of proficiency was more complex than expected and primarily evidenced in the accuracy (rather than frequency) of humor recognition independent of text properties. The article concludes with pedagogical suggestions and outlines future research areas.

Cross-cultural analysis of the use of humor by Russian and American English speakers (2012)
M. Shardakova

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