Comparative Approach in Teaching German as the Second and Czech as the First Foreign Language: the Case of Prepositional Government of Verbs

Abstract

The article focuses on the comparative approach in teaching German as the second foreign language simultaneously with Czech as the first foreign language at the Russian State University for the Humanities. The bachelor program “Slavistics and Central European studies: languages, culture and literature of the Czech Republic and Austria” at the RSUH has some unique features: from the first year of this program students learn simultaneously two foreign languages: Czech as the first foreign language and German as the second one, therefore, they often make mistakes in German due to the influence of their mother tongue, Russian, as well as English, learned at school, and Czech. If the teacher of German has a good command of the Czech language, he or she can use some similarities between German and Czech that have appeared due to their long-term language contact and convergent evolution. The prepositional government of some Czech and German verbs is one of these similarities that distinguish them from the Russian language. And many mistakes are made by students in their target languages due to the verbal government of Russian. But with that said this language transfer could be avoided or reduced if we show that plenty of German and Czech verbs have analogous verb government. In order to check this statement, we have made a set of exercises (substitution drill and translation “Czech – German”, “German – Czech”, “Russian – Czech, German”), which contained four couples of German and Czech verbs with prepositional government. The testing of these exercises on seven second-year-students of the RSUH has shown that such exercises could help students to focus on Czech-German grammatical similarities and reduce the influence of the Russian language.