В. Е. Адодуров – теоретик и практик преподавания русского языка как иностранного первой половины XVIII века

Abstract

This article is devoted to the practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language in the middle of the 18th century. As an example, the activity of Vasily Evdokimovich Adodurov, a member of Petersburg Academy of Sciences and the Russian grammar theorist, is used. Adodurov was not merely a theorist as the author of one of the first written tutorials in Russian as a foreign language (“Anfangs-Gründe der Ruβischen Sprache”, 1731 (“The first bases of the Russian language”)), but he actually taught Russian for the future Empress Catherine II (Catherine the Great) being his most famous student. Adodurov’s work, recently republished, is widely available. For linguists this work is of interest – first of all as a scientific codification of the Russian language dating back to the first thirty years of the 18th century. However, the scientific novelty of this article consists in the evaluation of Adodurov’s work as a tutorial for teaching Russian as a foreign language, as per its original intent, and the description of Adodurov’s methods of teaching Russian according to the educational traditions in the middle of the 18th century. The author of the article concludes that Adodurov’s work is of great value as an early written Russian language grammar, but at the same time it is not worked out well enough to be a tutorial and the results of Adodurov’s teaching the Empress indirectly testify to this fact.