Language interference and how to consider it when teaching the topic «prepositions of space in russian» to a foreign audience

About the author:

Irina I. Arbuzova,

Abstract:

The article discusses the phenomenon of language interference, and offers a classification of the mistakes made by students, while teaching them prepositional government, into interference mistakes (made due to the influence of the native language of students) and no-interference mistakes (caused only by ignorance of the relevant grammatical material). The difficulty of detection of signs of the influence of the English language in acquiring the grammatical topic «Russian Prepositions of Space» is described. The basis for this conclusion is a high degree of unmotivated errors in speech of English-speaking students when they use Russian Prepositions of Space (the article contains examples of such errors). The lack of signs of interference is an obstacle to the use of the comparative-contrastive method of teaching this subject to the English-speaking audience with the support of the students’ native language. The theme of the «Russian Prepositions of Space» has a high national-Russian specificity. Specifically Russian grammatical phenomena in comparison with the English are the rich Russian system of cases with its various word-endings; the presence of interdependence between such categories of the Russian language system, as prepositions and cases; a harsh impact of the values of Russian prefixes on the government of the verb; the dependence of the choice of the preposition on a variety of factors of development of the Russian phrase (a prefix in a prefixed verb, semantics of animateness or inanimateness of a noun, etc.). The article concludes that the national specificity of the grammatical category of Russian prepositions is the reason for the creation of not language-oriented but universal methods of its teaching to different audiences of foreign students.

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