EMOTIONAL TONALITY AS A VALUABLE SUBJECTIVE PARAMETER OF STUDY TEXT FOR RUSSIAN AS FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNERS

Abstract

Current paper addresses the results of the experiment conducted with Chinese students learning Russian as a foreign language (RFL). Scope of research is the correlation between, on the one hand, the emotional tonality of study texts used for teaching Russian punctuation to non-native speakers, and on the other hand – 1) subjective evaluation by foreign students themselves of the course appeal, effectiveness and the level of their satisfaction, and 2) objective progress of the teaching on the basis of such texts assessed via completion of an examination tasks. During the experimentation we used the preliminary results of the project for development of a computer-aided classifier of Russian-language texts based on their emotional tonality, executed by Laboratory of applied linguistics and cognitive studies at the Siberian federal university. Altogether, 30 students from PRC were divided into 3 groups: two experimental groups educated and examined on “Punctuation” on the matter of “happy” (№ 1) and, correspondingly, “sad” texts (№ 2); and the control group, which worked with neutral study texts used within educational program. After conduction of the experimental teaching with following examination, the examinee assessed their own interest in the course, its effectiveness and the level of their satisfaction with the studying process via filling in a questionnaire. The analysis of questionnaire answers and mistakes made while examination task showed that the nature of the analyzed study text emotion is important for both: subjective evaluation of the interest in learning; and objectively assessed progress in acquisition of the didactic units.

Keywords

• emotional tonality
• sentiment analysis
• study texts
• russian as a foreign language
• russian punctuation
• methods of teaching the russian language
• methodology of the russian language in high school
• chinese students