Error Gravity in Learners' Spoken Russian: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

The present study was designed to begin the work to establish a hierarchy of error gravity for different types of common errors in American learners' spoken Russian. Respondents included native speakers of Russian and English, teachers and non‐teachers, and residents of Russia and the U. S. Respondents were asked to compare a series of paired sentences that were identical except for a particular error and to select which sentence they found to be less irritating. The sentences were selected from oral proficiency interviews conducted with intermediate‐level learners of Russian. Respondents' selections of the least irritating utterances of each pair were analyzed in order to establish a hierarchy of error gravity, and the hierarchies established for each respondent class were compared to determine if representatives of each respondent class had similar or different views of the severity of different error types.

Lexicalized Aspectual Usage in Oral Proficiency Interviews

“…Rifkin's (1995) polling for perception of errors among speakers of Russian found learners’ mistakes in aspect to be in the middle of the spectrum of error gravity. In the subpopulation of Russians living in Russia who were not teachers of Russian (the likely target audience for learners at the Advanced level), errors in aspect ranked 3 on an eight‐point scale (1 to 9) of acceptability.…”

Negative Transfer in the Writing of Proficient Students of Russian: A Comparison of Heritage Language Learners and Second Language Learners

“…There have been a number of studies of the acquisition of Russian as a second language (Gor et al, 2009;Hasko, 2009;Rifkin, 1995;Rosengrant, 1987;Thompson, 1997) as well as a heritage language (Andrews, 2001;Isurin & Ivanova-Sullivan, 2008;Kagan, 2001;Kagan & Dillon, 2001;Polinsky, 2000;Polinsky, 2008;Polinsky & Kagan, 2007;Romanova, 2008). These studies showed that heritage and second language learners of Russian, having very different backgrounds, often make errors in the same categories (word order, tense and aspect, case errors).…”

“…For instance, the grammatical system of the Russian language is generally very difficult to master for native speakers of English because of its extensive morphology, and verbs of motion are reported to be one of the main challenges (Hasko, 2009;Gor et al, 2009). Besides errors in production of verbs of motion, learners of Russian usually make errors in case and gender, in voice, conjugation, aspect and tense (Rifkin, 1995).…”

“…However, there are still areas that need further research. Specifically several scholars (Hasko, 2009;Rifkin, 1995;Gor et al, 2009) have noted that the field of acquisition of Russian as a second language is "under-researched" (Hasko, 2009, p. 360) and specific SL Russian transfer errors are yet to be studied thoroughly.…”

Foreign Accents in Polish: Non-native Speakers’ and Native Listeners’ Views

“…Nevertheless, some foreign-accented versions of other languages have also come under scrutiny (e.g. Swedish (Abelin andBoyd 2000, Boyd 2003), German (Missaglia 1999, Gut 2007, Spanish (Schairer 1992), French (Mareuil, Brahimi and Gendrot 2011) and Russian (Rifkin 1995)), although such studies are still relatively infrequent in comparison with the former. This means, in consequence, that while we know much about reactions to non-native English, attitudes towards foreign accents in other languages, such as Polish, still remain to be examined in detail.…”