Rate My Professor Maria Volynsky

Volynsky's research and teaching interests include TESOL, linguistic diversity, multilingualism, online teaching, social emotional learning, language acquisition, and assessment. She co-authored the peer-reviewed article "Motion Encoding in Russian and English: Moving Beyond Talmy’s Typology" with Aneta Pavlenko, published in The Modern Language Journal (Volume 99, Issue 1, pages 32-48, 2015). Additional publications from her earlier career, published under Elova, M., address developing critical thinking through reading (2005), skills of presentation in foreign language teaching (2004), time effect in pedagogy (2004), and intercultural aspects in teaching foreign languages for tourism (2003). She has delivered presentations at conferences including TESOL (2012), AAAL (2012), Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition (2011), and TALGS (2011) on topics such as L1 use in L2 classrooms, motion events in Russian-English bilinguals, and bidirectional transfer. At Drexel, she teaches English Composition courses for multilingual writers (ENGL 111, 112, 113) and native speakers (ENGL 101, 102, 103), both online and in-person. Administratively, she served as Co-Chair of the Writing Program (2016-2017) and has participated in panels on online teaching best practices and open educational resources. In 2026, she was selected as a Fulbright semi-finalist.