Teaching the Russian verb to Chinese philology students: functional-grammatical and methodological aspects

Abstract

Russian verb teaching experience to foreign (Chinese) philology students revealed the main difficulties in understanding topics related to the system of the Russian verb and its grammatical categories. These difficulties are due to a complex process of interaction between verb grammatical categories, grammatical and lexical meanings, grammatical form and context, and the general situation of speech. In terms of such interaction, various uses of verb forms, contexts allowing interchangeability of grammemes, as well as grammemes functioning in the meaning of another one are created. In the course of verb forms functioning implicit grammatical meanings easily recognized by a native speaker occur in the text but these forms are particularly problematic for foreign students. In the methods of teaching Russian as a foreign language, researchers and textbook authors generally focus on the category of aspect and on verbs of motion. Other grammatical categories of the verb attract scientists to a far lesser extent. Implicit narration meanings particularly lack attention. The purpose of this study is a comprehensive analysis of all the difficult cases associated with the verb, its grammatical categories and forms. Data obtained in the course of the study will be considered in the practice of teaching RCT and moreover it will give an opportunity to eliminate all the difficulties. Methods of observation, description, transformation, survey, functional and semantic analysis were used in the course of the study. Extracts from the Russian writers' texts selected from the National Corpus of the Russian Language provided the main language material. The research conducted suggests the tools for the development of foreign students' skills and abilities that will allow them to perceive implicit meanings expressed by verbal forms and to integrate their knowledge into speech. This requires a system-functional approach to teaching the discipline, involving various functionings of verb forms as well as rich lexical material. Besides, students’ additional efforts, a high level of language proficiency, a certain cultural level, and background knowledge will be necessary.