Innovation in Language Learning

Russian Learner Corpora http://www.web-corpora.net/RLC/ includes texts by learners of Russian as a foreign language with marked (Case, Aspect, Tense, etc.) and corrected errors. It is searchable both by lexical units and grammatical tags. The search can be general (in all available texts), level-specific (intermediate, advanced, etc.), and language-specific (in texts created only by native speakers of English, French, etc.). It helps a teacher of Russian as a foreign language to analyze general trends and problems in acqusition of particular language phenomena (aspect, subject-verb agreement, promouns, etc.), and to create practical exrcises for students based on real problems and real language material.

In this paper, we will consider how Russian Learner Corpora can be used for evaluating students’ problems with so-called “indefinite pronouns” in Russian and for developimg a system of exercises that would target the specific difficulties. 

The indefinite pronouns in Russian include four sets marked by prefixes or suffixes (-to, -nibud’, -libo, and koe-). The choice of a pronoun in a given situation depends of on many characteristics: (i) familiarity of the object to the speaker or the addressee, or even existence of the object; (ii) information about the quantitative characteristics of the (plural) object (the whole group or just a part of the group); (iii) information about the situation as a whole that is provided by some grammatical “indicators” in the sentence (tense, markers of plurality, etc.), and (iv) register (formal or informal) of the speech.

For native speakers the choice of a pronoun is intuitive, the L2 learners have to consider all the complexity of the factors. Often, their “calculations” are not correct. Usining the learner corpora helps the instructor and the students to find the “weak spots” in acquisition. System of exercises based on the corpora makes the students aware of the nature of the errors; it focuses on the “typical problems” and saves students from unnesessary struggle in the attempts to keep in mind all the complexity of the distribution. As a result, the students get involved into an active process of conscious analysis of errors instead of doing tedious and often inefficient drills.