Russian Studies in the Antipodes: Russian Language Teaching and Research in Australia and New Zealand

This article provides an overview and critical assessment of the development and current state of university Russian language teaching in Australia and New Zealand and examines the main directions of research in Russian Studies in these countries in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It also highlights various factors that influenced teaching and research in the field of the Russian language and literature. The relevance of the topic is due, on the one hand, to the urgency of examining the state of Russian studies in Australia and New Zealand in the light of ongoing political and socio-cultural changes, and, on the other hand, to the lack of research in this area. Both periods were chosen because it is impossible to explain the position of Russian studies in Australia and New Zealand in the twenty-first century without considering the trends in the development of the discipline in the previous century. The study is based on the analysis of press materials, official websites of Australian and New Zealand universities, statistical materials of higher education, and research publications. The article demonstrates that the dynamics of demand for teaching Russian at tertiary level in Australia and New Zealand, as well as the emergence or closure of Russian programs, certainly reflect changes in interest in the Russian language. However, university Russian language teaching in the two countries was also found to be strongly influenced by historical, economic, and political factors, as well as by government reforms in education and, in particular, language teaching. The article also demonstrates changes in the directions of research in the field of the Russian language and literature. It was observed that while in the twentieth century (especially in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s), more studies were published on the description of the grammatical and phonetic structure of the modern Russian literary language, as well as on comparative analyses of Slavonic languages, in the twenty-first century, a large number of works of an applied nature appeared, including publications on the methodology of teaching Russian and on applying the achievements of linguistics to teaching. In addition, while in the twentieth century literary studies dealt to a greater extent with the classics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the twenty-first century, more research has been devoted to the analysis of the works of contemporary poets and writers.