SEAH – ARCHITECTURE OF LINGUISTIC CREATIVITY

The event was held as part of the work on the SEAH project, on which the Department of Slavonic Philology has been working since 2020. For two years, the scientific workers of Polotsk State University:

• created a corpus on architecture and construction, which included scientific and methodological works of lecturers of the Faculty of Civil Engineering
• developed training modules for learning Russian as a foreign language based on the collected corpus

The seminar was organized in order to share the results of the work done and to make them available for linguists from other universities and educational institutions. The event brought together scientific workers from different universities: Vitebsk State University named after P.M. Masherov, Belarusian State University, Minsk State Linguistic University, Yanka Kupala State University of Grodno, Francisk Skorina Gomel State University, Baranovichi State University, MITSO, as well as the Higher School of Economics (Moscow), Baranovichi State University. Students of the specialties Russian as a foreign language and Architecture also became the participants of the seminar.

On April 21, the work was held within the framework of the round table Possibilities of Corpus Linguistics in Language Teaching: Methodological Tools. Svetlana Liasovich and Natalia Nester told about the process of the creation the Russian language corpus with professional orientation Architecture and Construction. And in continuation, colleagues from other universities shared their experience of research work in the field of corpus linguistics and methodological tools for working with corpora.

There was also one online speech by Professor Liudmila Rychkova, who is a leading researcher in the field of corpus linguistics in the Republic of Belarus. Liudmila was the first in the former Soviet Union who included the discipline of corpus linguistics in the curriculum for education. Together with her colleagues she initiated the creation of a module for regional and foreign press of the National Corpus of the Russian Language and took a direct part in its creation.

Our colleagues stated that the linguistic corpus created in the SEAH project has no analogues in Belarus today. They also told that it is a good start for the development of professional corpus linguistics.

In addition to a productive dialogue during the round table, the participants of the seminar had the opportunity to get to know the university and Polotsk more closely during the excursion programme.

The second day of the seminar on April 22 was full of interactive activities. All participants were divided into teams. Each of them was creating a new non-existent object of architectural heritage using the architectural terminology and SEAH Corps with the help of words and colored paper.

The teams were able to get to know the architecture of Polotsk better and update the methodological tools that were discussed the previous day during the architectural quest around Polotsk. At the end of the work, all participants exchanged positive words. On postcards they wrote the wishes and the name of the architectural monument that they would advise to visit, they drew out a route for future architectural impressions.

The creative atmosphere of the meeting inspired and outlined the prospects. So it is not surprising that during the seminar plans for cooperation with colleagues from different universities were born, which inspired the groundwork for future projects.

Many participants stayed to enjoy the magical atmosphere of Polotsk on Saturday, wishing to attend an organ concert in St. Sophia Cathedral and once again walk along the Polotsk streets.

We would like to thank the participants for the fruitful work and jointly created wonderful atmosphere of scientific cooperation and creativity!