Andrea Nelson, Bryn Mawr College
Foreign language pedagogy in the United States is currently and increasingly informed by the theoretical and empirical insights into foreign language learning provided by the subdiscipline of applied linguistics known as Second Language Acquisition (SLA). This paper addresses the Russian context by presenting a portion of findings from my doctoral dissertation concerning early syntactic behavior in Russian foreign language learning.
The dissertation, conducted within an empirical SLA framework, considers the nature and development of a range of linguistic aspects in early Russian foreign language learning. Its empirical core consists of the learning histories of two individuals engaged in the equivalent of their first year of formal Russian language study, the data drawn from verbatim accounts of these individuals in conversation with their native speaking instructor which were gathered on videotaped, then subsequently transcribed, coded, entered into a computer database and assessed. Assessments of these data focused on the nature and development of these individuals' grammatical and lexical morphological systems as well as their baseline syntactic behavior as reflected by a series of lexical collocational or syntagmatic analyses. This paper focuses on the findings of the latter series of analyses.
The lexical collocational analyses of the dissertation categorized lexemes as both unique and individual items and as part of a larger grammatical or word classes. They also explored the participants' language corpora in terms of both observable fixed, or formulaic, syntactic behavior as well investigated more generalized patterns of syntactic expression. The findings presented in this paper include the observations in both individuals corpora of a substantial use of syntactic behavior which may be categorized as fixed or formulaic, including such frequently and consistently used dual lexical expressions as "kak po-russki?" and "ne ponimaju," and trial lexical expressions such as "ja ne znaju" and "ja ne xochu." The findings also include the further observation that phrases such as these appear not to be isolated phenomenon in these data but rather appear to reflect more pervasive and consistent trends in both learners' syntactic-syntagmatic behavior, including, for example, the tendency for these individuals to use frequent and recurring grammatical lexical collocational patterns such as "pronoun verb" and "pronoun adverb verb."
The paper argues that these findings have immediate implications and consequences for the profession. Among these are included a documented and empirically-based appreciation for early syntactic expression in Russian foreign language learning, expression which constitutes the base of knowledge from which these individual language learners operate. They also include a necessary basis for further research, a starting point for inquiry which enables the design and implementation of more focused research. Suggestions for such research are presented as well as more pointed links to Russian foreign language pedagogy.