CASE IN RUSSIAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE: DESCRIPTION, ACQUISITION, TEACHING

This volume investigates the development of case amongst learners of Russian FL and ultimately proposes a syllabus for teaching case in instructed learning environments. The theoretical framework adopted here is Pienemann’s (1998) Processability Theory - a theory of Second Language Acquisition that (a) assumes Levelt’s (1989) psycholinguistic model for oral production and (b) the Lexical-Functional Grammar framework for language description. For reasons of language description, I first explain how the case theory works in general, and then assuming a revised version of King’s (1995) types of case assignment for Russian, I look at how the Russian case system is viewed within the LFG framework. Adapting a PT universal hypothesis for morphological development to Russian case, I tested it on a group of learners of Russian FL at different levels of proficiency and with a varied L1 background. Analysis on a corpus of semi-spontaneous oral data collected among 21 learners confirms the hypotheses that (a) all the learners at a given PT stage are able to mark case in structures requiring the activation of lower procedures, (b) the transfer of case from the L1 to Russian L2 is constrained by the processability of the structures in which case is used, (c) the learners move from one to multiple case marking and from emergence to accuracy, and (d) the different types of case assignment parallel PT developmental stages. A final section proposes a developmentally motivated syllabus for teaching case in classes of Russian as a foreign language. My proposal mirrors the developmental stages found in my research and aims at providing students with a learning path that is in line with their cognitive readiness.