Scoring Aspect in an Interrupted-Narrative Task
Ms. Petrova teaches a mixed third-year Russian class at a public high school. The unit assessment asks students to narrate an interrupted evening in five sentences. Daniel, a strong student whose first language is English, writes: «Я прочитал книгу, когда зазвонил телефон. Потом я говорил с мамой.» The rubric awards two points for correct aspect in background and interrupted clauses, and one point for sequence markers. Daniel uses зазвонил correctly and includes потом, but his teacher suspects aspect errors. In a conference, Daniel says both sentences 'sound right' because English uses one past tense: 'I read a book when the phone rang.' The department policy says to mark aspect errors but not to penalize oral fluency. Ms. Petrova has a 20-minute conference and one homework assignment to address the issue before the retake. She must decide how to score the two clauses, what to teach, and how to avoid reinforcing Daniel's translation habit.
1. Score the two clauses under the rubric and justify each decision. Distinguish clear errors from defensible alternatives.
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Scoring. Award 1 of 2 points for the first sentence. The interrupting verb зазвонил is correctly perfective, but прочитал is perfective and presents the reading as a completed result. With когда + зазвонил, the natural reading is an ongoing background action, so the expected form is читал: «Я читал книгу, когда зазвонил телефон». There is a narrow defensible reading - 'I had finished the book when the phone rang' - but the prompt asks for an interrupted evening and the next sentence begins with «Потом», so the intended meaning is interruption, not pluperfect. Do not award the background point.
Second sentence. «Потом я говорил с мамой» is not a hard grammatical error: Russian imperfective can name a completed fact, especially when the process or fact is in focus. But with «потом» and a single phone call, «поговорил» is more precise for a bounded completed conversation. Treat this as a style/lexical aspect issue, not a rubric deduction, unless the rubric separately rewards boundedness. Explain the difference so Daniel does not conclude that every completed action must be perfective.
2. Design the 20-minute conference sequence. What should Ms. Petrova do minute by minute, and what should she avoid?
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Use a timeline, not a rule list. Minutes 1-5: ask Daniel to tell the story in English and mark the background action and the interrupting action. Minutes 5-10: contrast «Я читал книгу, когда зазвонил телефон» with «Я прочитал книгу, потом зазвонил телефон». Ask which event was in progress and which happened once. Minutes 10-15: have him revise his own sentence and justify the choice using the ideas 'process/background' and 'single completed event'. Minutes 15-20: transfer to two new prompts, one with «когда», one with «потом», and ask him to say why. Do not begin with aspect terminology; begin with discourse function. End with a written exit ticket: one sentence and one explanation. This targets the English one-past-tense habit without overloading him with all aspect uses.
3. What follow-up homework should Ms. Petrova assign, and how should it be structured so that Daniel chooses aspect from meaning rather than from English tense?
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Assign five contextualized sentence-combining items, not isolated blanks. Example: 'Я / читать / книга. / Зазвонить / телефон.' → «Я читал книгу, когда зазвонил телефон». Include one item where both aspects are possible with different meanings, e.g., «Вчера я ___ (читал/прочитал) эту статью», and require a one-sentence justification. Include one 'потом' sequence item requiring perfective. Daniel should underline the background action and circle the bounded event. The goal is for him to choose aspect from discourse function, not from an English tense. Collect the exit ticket and review only the justifications, not just the answers. This also gives Ms. Petrova evidence for the retake decision.