Matter Matters: A Media Module for The Aspect Book for Russian familiarizes students with the science of linguistics, contextualized to learning Russian. All Russian verbs express a grammatical category called aspect (perfective vs. imperfective) absent in English. Aspect involves dozens of contrasting uses, and is notoriously difficult for linguists to describe and learners to master. Matter Matters showcases intellectual breakthroughs in the linguistic description of aspect, presented as an interactive animated module. Learners gain insight into methods of linguistic inquiry and acquire language mastery beyond what was previously possible. Student achievements will be assessed according to national standards. Matter Matters is being integrated into both the Linguistics and Russian language curricula. Because all Slavic languages (e.g., Czech, Polish, SerboCroatian) have the grammatical category of aspect, this product may inspire further linguistic research into aspectual categories and spawn similar texts for other languages. The completed MediaModule will be available to language professionals, and lead to the production of a MediaBook, to be published and distributed commercially and piloted across the country.
