RKI-ITA-2000

RKI-ITA-2000 is a bilingual (Russian–Italian) corpus specifically designed for the study of metalinguistic notions in textbooks for teaching Russian as a Foreign Language (RFL) used in the Italian educational context. The corpus includes coursebooks and reference grammars published in Italy since 2000 and adopted in secondary schools and universities for Italian-speaking learners of Russian. The corpus was developed through a systematic survey of Russian-language teaching materials used in Italy, based on the analysis of university syllabi, school curricula, library catalogues, and publishers’ catalogues. The selection of textbooks was guided by a set of criteria, including publication date (2000 onwards), proficiency levels covered (A1–B2), textbook typology (coursebooks and grammars), diffusion within the Italian educational system, and editorial reliability. The corpus focuses on two types of metalinguistic content: grammatical explanations and exercise instructions. After digitisation and OCR processing, the selected materials were manually revised, segmented, and annotated. The resulting texts were encoded and integrated into the Sketch Engine platform, allowing both qualitative and quantitative analyses. RKI-ITA-2000 currently includes 15 coursebooks (belonging to 7 teaching series) and 7 reference grammars, covering proficiency levels A1–B2. Each text is accompanied by metadata including title, author(s), year of publication, textbook type, and proficiency level. Additional tags allow users to identify and compare different categories of metalinguistic content across textbooks. The corpus was created within the framework of the Department of Excellence Project Inclusive Humanities (2023–2027), University of Verona. It provides a research infrastructure for investigating the treatment of grammar and metalinguistic awareness in Russian language teaching materials and for supporting the development of more inclusive approaches to the teaching of Russian as a foreign and heritage language.