Common grammatical errors made by Turkmen learners of Russian as a foreign language (insights from the Russian Learner Corpus)

Abstract

The problem of dealing with typical grammatical errors made by foreign learners of Russian has been a continuous pursuit in the field of Russian teaching and learning. Its possible solutions include adapting educational materials to make grammar easier to digest and developing more efficient teaching strategies and methods to overcome barriers to mastering Russian grammar. This article overviews some common grammatical errors in the Russian speech of various categories of Turkmen students, identifies the causes for their occurrence, and suggests ways to prevent them. With this aim, a mixed-methods design, incorporating the corpus and statistical analysis and the descriptive method, was used. The findings revealed that marking grammatical errors in the Russian Learner Corpus expands their typology. Most of the identified morphological errors are due to typological differences between the Russian and Turkmen languages, particularly the absence of grammatical gender, as well as the lack of any mechanism for gender, number, and case agreement. Interlingual interference stands out as the main cause of grammatical errors in writing, as it hinders the acquisition of foreign grammatical structures and leads to violations of the principle of communicative appropriateness.

Keywords

• russian as a foreign language
• turkmen language
• grammatical error
• grammatical category
• agreement category
• linguistic competence
• communicative competence