Lessons from experience: using Revita to teach Russian as a heritage language

Teaching heritage language presents many challenges, one of the greatest of which arises when the teacher must work with a heterogeneous audience. Our article describes the experiences in integration of an intelligent tutoring tool into university curricula for teaching heritage Russian in two countries – Finland and Kazakhstan. The traditions of teaching Russian in the two countries, while different in many respects, share an important feature: heritage learners of Russian represent a sizable proportion of all students – which needs to be addressed both pedagogically and technologically. The work is based on the language-learning system Revita (helsinki.fi/revita), which helps students learn languages by automatically creating exercises from arbitrary authentic text materials, chosen by the students or teachers.