Contrastive approach in teaching Ukrainian as a foreign language

Abstract

The article continues a series of studies dedicated to teaching the Ukrainian language to foreign students who either know or have experience in studying Russian. This group comprises foreigners from post-Soviet countries, as well as foreign master’s and postgraduate students who previously studied in Ukrainian higher education institutions in Russian. In compliance with the Law on Education, they are now studying Ukrainian or learning it as the state language of their current country of study. The mastery of a new foreign language, as is commonly known, is built upon existing speaking experience, which determines the methodological necessity of comparing the systems of the known language with the language being studied. Such a comparative analysis allows the identification of common features in both languages and facilitates the application of previously acquired knowledge and skills in learning a new foreign language. Interference, understood as the interaction of different language systems, directly impacts the acquisition of a new language system. The foundation for studying and regulating interference processes lies in the contrastive approach. Contrastive linguistics aims to identify differences and similarities between modern languages, aiding in determining the directions of interference and explaining the cause of typical errors. In our previous articles, we explored interference effects when Russian-speaking foreigners studied the Ukrainian language, focusing on phonetics, grammar, and syntax. These studies involved a comparative analysis of the functional-communicative organization of sentences, exemplified by the examination of ways to express subject-predicate relations in Ukrainian and Russian. Functional-communicative grammar emphasizes the pivotal role of syntax as a system that organizes all other language levels. It views a sentence from a communicative organizational perspective as an utterance formed according to a specifically defined structural scheme, with the structural core being the predicate. The predicate designates specific positions for the participants in the situation described by the proposition (subject names or actants) and their quantity. The proposed article investigates various types of extenders for the predicative centre of sentences, considers primary methods of expressing object, meaning, and circumstantial relations in both simple and complex sentences, and highlights key differences in expressing these relations between Ukrainian and Russian. These differences merit the attention of Russian-speaking learners to prevent interference errors. The methodical recommendations provided herein may prove beneficial to teachers and methodologists in developing training programs, crafting textbooks, and designing teaching materials for Ukrainian language instruction tailored to specific groups of foreign learners. They also serve as valuable resources for novice teachers in preparing for practical classes.