Second-Year Master's Students Successfully Defend Their Theses

On June 10 and 11, 2026, second-year students of the "Russian as a Foreign Language" (RFL) Master's program defended their graduation theses. The program attracts not only Russian students but also youth from other countries, including the Kingdom of Bahrain, Serbia, Japan, and Taiwan. The defense committee highly praised their exceptional level of Russian proficiency.

Students work on their research throughout the year, and self-discipline and motivation remain the biggest challenges in this process. Finding a topic that truly inspires you for a long time is not easy, and the graduates shared their secrets on how they chose their fields of study during their Master’s program.

Following tradition on defense day, the head of the committee, Maria Dmitrievna Voeikova, congratulated the graduates on their successful defenses and on entering a new stage of life, where the Master's students now become colleagues to their mentors.

Gulnara Pervushina

I graduated from the Faculty of Philology at Krasnoyarsk State University more than 25 years ago. The decision to enroll in a Master's program in 2024 was completely spontaneous. I was already teaching RFL and looking for professional development courses when I stumbled upon the 'Russian as a Foreign Language in the Interaction of Languages and Cultures' program. It immediately sparked my interest, and I decided to take a leap of faith. These two years of study were incredibly engaging and flew by in a flash.

My research focused on the lexical-typological analysis of verbs within the semantic field of 'remember'. Working with RFL students, I noticed how difficult it was for them to master our system of prefixes and suffixes. Later, during the data collection phase for my term papers and thesis, I utilized the Russian Learner Corpus (RLC). I wanted to see what errors non-native speakers make when using the verb pomnit (to remember) and its derivatives, and which verbs they tend to confuse. My goal was twofold: to understand the nature of these mistakes and to apply my findings in practice.

Those were two incredibly interesting years of study that seemed to just fly by.

While working on my term papers and graduation thesis, I was in constant contact with my academic supervisor, Tatyana Isidorovna Reznikova. It is thanks to our discussions that I developed an interest in lexical typology. All the research formats were completely new to me, including using the Russian National Corpus — both its main corpus and parallel subcorpora —, collecting and analyzing learner errors, designing surveys for informants, interviewing them, and building semantic maps. It was an invaluable experience that allowed me to gain new knowledge and skills. I am deeply grateful to my supervisor for this and thrilled that this Master's program offers such opportunities.

Mikhail Paporotskiy

I completed my Bachelor's degree in "Fundamental and Computational Linguistics" at the HSE School of Linguistics. There, I researched second-language acquisition using data from various learner corpora. In particular, I got to work with the Russian Learner Corpus (RLC), which is highly valuable for studying the interlanguage of RFL students. In my Master's program, I decided to shift the focus from the RFL students' learner texts to how these texts are tagged by annotators and corpus developers. I managed to identify 'gray zones' in annotation — contexts where it is clear that annotators disagree because the corpus annotation guidelines lack specific instructions for those cases. I hope the results of my work will help improve the RLC and make it an even more useful tool for RFL research and teaching methodology.

I hope that the results of my work will help improve the RLC.

Even though I had already defended several term papers and a Bachelor's thesis, defending a Master's thesis was still very nerve-wracking. To ensure everything went smoothly, I tried to design the presentation not just for the audience, but for myself as well. I didn't overload the slides with information but instead clearly outlined the key talking points. First, this helped the audience follow my presentation, and second, it kept me on track with a well-thought-out structure. I create my presentations in Figma because it allows for adding many graphic elements, which helps me map out my talking points during the preparation process and makes the slides look much more appealing.

Zeynab Hasan

I completed my Bachelor's degree at the School of Design, specializing in 'Communication Design,' so transitioning to RFL and linguistics was a completely new phase for me, yet a very logical one: it is fascinating to see how people perceive and convey meaning. I have always been drawn to everything related to the Arabic language and how it interacts with other languages. Arabic is my native language, and I studied Russian in Russia, so I perfectly understood the challenges that Arabic-speaking students face.

I have always been drawn to everything related to the Arabic language and how it interacts with other languages.

The topic of my thesis, 'Voice Selection Errors in Arabic-Speaking Students of Russian as a Foreign Language,' largely grew out of my own personal experience. I noticed that I sometimes doubted my choice of passive voice structures in Russian: when it is better to say 'the window is open' versus 'someone opened the window,' and why one form sounds natural in context while another does not. The passive voice is one of those areas where international students often struggle. The most exciting part was running the experiment: designing it, creating tasks, planning stimuli, and then seeing how the participants responded. It was important to me not just to write a theoretical paper, but to actually test how Arabic-speaking students perceive and use passive constructions in Russian. Some of my assumptions were confirmed, while other results turned out to be completely unexpected. That is exactly the moment when your work stops being just a text and becomes real research.

The defense itself went very smoothly, you could say pretty chill, even though I honestly thought I would be much more nervous. Of course, a thesis defense is an important milestone, and tension is inevitable. But my main piece of advice to all students is this: do not view the committee as people out to 'catch' you making a mistake. In reality, if they ask questions, it does not mean something is wrong with your work or that someone necessarily disagrees. Most of the time, the committee members are genuinely interested in hearing more: why you chose that approach, how you interpreted the results, or where you can go from there.