World language education
Dynamic assessment and instructor's feedback in a language classroom
Heritage language maintenance
Family language policy
Izolda (Iza) Savenkova is is a Ph.D. student in the Applied Linguistics and Language Education program at the ÌÇÐÄÉÙÅ®, College Park. She holds a Master’s Degree in Second Language Acquisition with a specialization in Teaching Russian as a Foreign Language from Lomonosov Moscow State University. Her research interests include second language pedagogy, world language teaching and learning, heritage language maintenance, and family language policy. She is also a co-author (with Alyssa DeBlasio, Dickinson College) of the student-centered, inquiry-based textbook Pro-dvizhenie: Advanced Russian through Film and Media (Georgetown University Press, 2022), designed to build Advanced-level Russian proficiency. Prior to joining the PhD program at the UMD, she taught all levels of Russian at Dickinson College (PA) and Columbia University (NY). Since 2018, she has served as a regular summer faculty member at the Middlebury College Kathryn Davis School of Russian.
Please feel free to reach out if you see a possibility to work on any projects together: isavenko@umd.edu
Pro-dvizhenie: Advanced Russian through Film and Media. by Alyssa DeBlasio and Izolda Savenkova. Georgetown University Press, 2022.
DeBlasio, A., & Savenkova, I. (2025). Media and motivation in advanced language courses for Gen Z learners. In J. Merrill, O. Makarova, & S. V. Nuss (Eds.), Content-based teaching of Russian as a foreign language (pp. 182–196). Routledge.
DeBlasio, A., Filippova, I., & Savenkova, I. (2024). Globally integrated community-based pedagogy for the Russian classroom: Developing a historic walking tour as a community project. In S. V. Nuss & W. W. Martelle (Eds.), Teaching Russian creatively with and beyond the textbook (pp. 75–92). Routledge.
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND (College Park, MD)
2025/2026
RUSS401: Advanced Russian Composition (Instructor, Fall 2025)
TLPL446: Language Variation and Multilingualism in Elementary Classrooms (Instructor of Record, Fall 2025)
2024/2025
TLPL446: Language Variation and Multilingualism in Elementary Classrooms (Instructional Assistant, Fall 2024)
TLPL210: Childhood Reimagined: Learning In and Out of Schools (Instructional Assistant, Spring 2025)