Penza, 17 April 2016. PenzaNews. Over 700 people from the Penza region took part in Total Dictation, an international Russian literacy initiative. Most of them participated in the event at the Faculty of History, Languages and Literature of the Penza State University.

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409 people came to the university facilities to write the dictation, the PSU History and Languages Faculty head Oleg Yagov wrote in his Facebook.

Among them, he added, was Victor Kondrashin, member of the Russian Federation Council committee on science, education and culture from the Penza region Legislative Assembly, who suggested to involve all regional executive and legislative officials in the initiative.

The text of the 2016 Total Dictation was written by the children’s books writer Andrei Usachev.

Just like in the previous years, the text was comprised of tree parts. The first one was used for dictations for the Russian Far East, Eastern Siberia and the foreign countries in the relevant time zones. The second part was allotted for the Ural and the Western Siberia, while the third was used by the European part of Russia, including Penza, as well as in Europe and the United States.

The 2015 initiative, which had taken place on April 18, encompassed six continents, 60 countries and 500 cities.

The board of experts in the Penza region, which featured PSU Russian Language Department professors, had checked 283 dictation papers. 17 of them received the highest grade, which was three times more than the countrywide average ratio.