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COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH IN TEACHING RUSSIAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE: NEW RESOURCES, NEW ACTIVITIES
E.M. Baeva
St. Petersburg State University (St. Petersburg, Russia)
Abstract: Communicative language teaching is perhaps the most popular approach to foreign languages. It usually prioritizes fluency over accuracy and it is therefore vital to obtain and design study materials which will closely resemble real life communicative situations. A spoken speech corpus could be an excellent source of this kind of materials, and the article speculates on the benefits that a corpus-based approach may bring to teaching Russian as a foreign language. As an example, the author uses the corpus of authentic spontaneous Russian spoken speech (One Speaker's Day) which has been created in St. Petersburg, with the writer's contribution. The article briefly outlines the history of creation and the main features of the spoken speech corpus, and then regards some possible implementations of the corpus data in a classroom. The author focuses on several phonetical, lexical, sociolinguistic, discursive and communicative characteristics of the data assembled and annotated in the corpus. Since the data exists in both audiorecording and transcribed texts, it can provide an invaluable foundation for fluency practice activities in a foreign classroom, with some examples suggested in the article.
Key words: methodology of teaching foreign languages, Russian as a foreign language, corpus-based approach, communicative approach / communicative language teaching, study materials.
For citation:
Baeva, E.M. (2017), Communicative approach in teaching Russian as a foreign language: new resources, new activities. Communication Studies, No. 2 (12), pp. 89-95.
About the author:
Baeva Ekaterina Mikhailovna, Dr., Associate Professor of the English department
Corresponding author:
Postal address: 11, Universitetskaya nab., St. Petersburg, 199034, Russia E-mail: e.baeva@spbu.ru
Received: April 28, 2017
© Е.М. Баева, 2017
Communicative language teaching (CLT) can be defined as a "meaning-based, learner-centered approach to L2 teaching where fluency is given priority over accuracy and the emphasis is on the comprehension and production of messages, not the teaching or correction of language form" [Spada 2007: 272].
Since the language classroom is intended as a preparation for survival in the real world and since real communication is a defining characteristic of CLT, the relationship between classroom activities and real life is one of the key CLT issues. It has been debatable how far classroom activities should mirror the real world and use "authentic" sources. While the majority of language instructors and theorists have argued in favor of authenticity [Richards 2006], some claim that authentic materials are a burden to the teacher, because they are not calibrated, not built around a graded syllabus and often contain difficult and irrelevant language [Widdowson 1990: 128]. Challenging as it may seem, it is however a key objective of a language teacher to find modern, up-to-date and communicatively oriented materials for classroom activities which will provide the students with experience close to real life.
Every day a person interacts with those around them in a variety of communicative situations. The teacher's goal should be introducing the learners to these situations so that they will be able to process, understand and produce any kind of spoken speech appropriate for the situation. It is not a secret that the Russian audioscripts recorded in a studio by professionals are dramatically different from the speech we hear in real life, that is why it is all the more important to implement new language resources. One of the resources is the corpus of everyday Russian spoken speech One Speaker's Day (ORD, abbreviated from the Russian Odin Rechevoj Den) [Bogdanova-Beglarian 2014].
This spoken Russian corpus is a unique source of information for Russian language learners, teachers and researchers. It has been designed and assembled in St Petersburg. In terms of socio- and psycholinguistics, the corpus is well-balanced and provides information not only about the language, but of its speakers. The initial goal of the language researchers working of the corpus was to observe and describe spoken speech of a contemporary Russian city, bearing in mind the needs of integral speech modeling, but since then the project has expanded into a vast linguistic study of the spoken Russian language on many linguistic levels. In addition to that, the prospective advances of using corpus-based approach in teaching Russian as a foreign language has already been mentioned when talking about innovative lexicographical speech projects [Bogdanova-Beglarian 2015a].
Where does the ORD corpus data come from? There are more than a hundred volunteer speakers, with their interlocutors approximately 1000, whose speech has been recorded. The volunteers, carefully preselected by the researchers, spend a day wearing a portable audio recorder and a microphone. All their conversations are being recorded and then transcribed as a text in standard spelling, apart from some phonetically relevant different cases. The
texts are divided are subdivided into macro and micro communicative episodes, and there is also sociological survey and a couple of psychological tests for the participants to fill in. The survey has been specifically designed for this project and it contains information valuable for the ones interested in sociolin-guistic studies.
Let us explore several benefits of spoken speech corpus resources in communicative teaching Russian as a foreign language and how to implement them in a classroom.
Phonetical level
Resources: The ORD corpus contains more than a thousand hours of spoken speech. It has been spoken by men and women, children and adults, highly educated academics and people of menial professions with only secondary school education. There is a tremendous variety of voices, accents, pronunciation types and styles, connected speech, spontaneous speech, prewritten speech etc. which make it an invaluable recourse of teaching real-life phonetics, crucial for foreigners. Unfortunately, foreign students who find themselves in the vortex of Russian speech interactions are often unprepared to the fact that the language sounds so terribly different from what they have gathered in their textbooks. One of the biggest stumbling points for learners are the so called allegro forms - the reduced, or compressed colloquial forms of Russian words. Among the reasons of their occurrence is speech rate, which is spontaneous spoken speech tends to be rather high, producing extra difficulties for the students. However, studies show that the words most affected by spontaneous reduction are those highly frequent [Bybee 2003; Palshina 2012]. Moreover, reduced forms are rather widespread in certain common communicative situations (e.g., when greeting someone or saying good-bye] and it is therefore essential to learn to distinguish them and to pronounce them correctly. The ORD corpus provides sufficient resources for this purpose, and it particularly useful, taking into account the number of different speakers and communicative scenarios being defined by the researchers. Among the words with the highest frequency in colloquial speech noted in ORD are buit (budet, will be], cho (chto, what], vasche (voobsche, in general], gryu (govoryu, I say], schas (se-jchas, now], zdrasti (zdravstvujte, hello], psiba (spasibo; thank you] and so on [Palshina 2013].
What you can do with them: Preteach/elicit reduced word forms. Listen to some conversations and make students write down what they hear, in transcription, not in spelling. Emphasize the context and the situation when these compressed forms occur. Make students reenact the dialogues, then compose their own, using the key vocabulary in reduced forms, aiming at the most connected speech.
Lexical level
Resources: Balanced on different social levels, ORD features broad and most particular vocabulary, in both formal and informal registers, with ob-
scene and rare words, with slang, professional jargons and colloquial word formation. Studying example from everyday Russian spontaneous speech may be conducive to understanding how a certain social group talks; for example, there are very curious examples in contemporary speech of noun building with the suffix -ov-/-ev- + neutral ending o, such as in slang words gonevo (something untrue), razvodilovo (something intended to trick) etc. [Bogdanova-Beglaryan 2015b]. These examples certainly cannot be found in traditional textbooks, however modern they might be, but are likely to be heard in real life, so the learner should be prepared, in order not to be trapped in an awkward situation.
What you can do with them: Make a glossary of useful vocabulary, depending on a situation and a social group. Ask the students to make a glossary of colloquial forms and try to define them. Reenact the dialogues heard on tape. Find examples of situational dialogues in textbooks, newspapers, fiction etc. and rewrite them using more colloquial words; while reading them out loud, pay attention to pronunciation, keep it simplified, as it is meant to be in connected spoken speech. "Translate" the colloquial speech into a more standard one. Concentrate your students' attention on speakers' social roles and statuses; ask them what language would be appropriate while talking to your peers, your seniors, and so on.
Sociolinguistic level
Resources: There is a multilevel classification of all ORD speaker groups based on their social characteristics, such as gender, age, education, social status, profession etc. [Baeva 2014]. For instance, there are five groups of speakers according to gender, several groups based on the education criterion, at least ten professional groups, three social status groups, five groups of people based on their place of birth and the longest residence.
The annotated ORD data allows the teacher to create study materials targeted specifically for their learners' needs, encouraging their motivation. This is particularly beneficial in one-to-one studying. For example, a student aiming at doing a degree in Russia may be interested in 'students speak', a businessman looking for business opportunity will benefit from listening to authentic negotiations, an engineer can get new experience when studying professional conversations, and so on. Moreover, students will find that there are many communicative roles for a single person during everyday speech interactions, and they vary due to the circumstances, e.g. in a course of a single day a speaker may be performing a communicative part of a relative, a colleague, a boss, a tutor, a friend and many others. It is rather helpful to explore the differences in speech, diving into social context and linguistic appropriateness, studying register and style.
What you can do with them: Listen to a person performing a part of a "colleague" and then a "boss", a "parent" and then a "child". Elicit/preteach key vocabulary and functional language, discuss other speech marks that help distinguish one social role from another. Make the students practice at length,
possibly in pairs or small groups, changing roles. Social roles is an essential part of everyday communication, you want your learners to be ready for the "real action".
Communicative and discursive level
ORD provides excellent material when it comes to studying pragmatic units and discursive marks. One of the most outstanding features of modern Russian speech are the so called pragmatemes, or pragmatic marks, by which we mean spoken units that are neither strictly lexical nor grammatical. These words have partially lost their lexical and grammatical meaning while having gained a range of communicative functions, for example, discourse marks (zhaesh chto, you know what?; vot, well], approximation marks (vse dela, and all that; pyatoe-desyatoe, this and that], hesitation marks (tam, there; eto, this] and many others [Bogdanova-Beglaryan et al. 2016: 76]. These units are very frequent in spoken speech and it is necessary for the learners to be able to process them.
Furthermore, all ORD data has been annotated on the levels of communicative situations, where macro and micro speech episodes are defined. There is also an impressive number of communicative scenarios, such as public presentations, professional conversations, business negotiations, small talk, client vs company dialogues, customer enquiries, conversations with service providers, etc. Those situational dialogues are invaluable material for the teachers who favor communicative learning. It is possible to find a suitable conversation to illustrate almost any social interaction, and a series of communicative place tags (such as 'home', 'work', 'bank', 'university', 'transport', and so on] also provide some extra linguistic context.
What to do with them: anything! You could use situational dialogues when you study a particular lexical topic (e.g., 'studying'] or a functional language (e.g., asking for information]. There is an unlimited number of lexical, grammatical, functional assignments. Study etiquette formulae, syntactic structure; ask the students to scan the audioscript for pragmatic units, decide, whether they help the speaker to convey their ideas or obstruct the understanding.
To conclude, using corpus data in communicative language teaching, in particular when teaching Russian, nowadays seems essential and highly recommended. Spoken corpus data provide unprecedented speech evidence, very useful for those who eventually travel to Russia and interact with native speakers in many different communicative situations, playing different social parts and using a vast range of modern vocabulary and grammar. There are a lot of language learning activities, both individual and group, where corpus material can be successfully implemented, and even an seasoned teacher will find ORD spoken data to their aid.
References
Baeva, E.M. (2014), On Means of Sociolingiustic Balancing of a Spoken Corpus
(Drawn on one Speaker's Day). Perm University Herald. Russian and Foreign
Philology, Iss. 4 (28), pp. 48-57. (in Russian)
Bogdanova-Beglaryan, N.V. (Ed.) (2016), Russkii yazyk povsednevnogo obshcheniya: osobennosti funktsionirovaniya v raznykh sotsial'nykh gruppakh [Russian everyday speech: its particularities and use in different social groups], St. Petersburg, 221 p. (in Russian)
Bogdanova-Beglaryan, N.V. (2015a), Povsednevnaya rech' kak material dlya prepoda-vaniya v inostrannoi auditorii: korpusnyi podkhod i rechevaya leksikografiya [Everyday speech as a material for teaching in foreign class: corpus-based approach and speech lexicography]. Magiya INNO: novoe v issledovanii yazyka i metodike ego prepodavaniya [The Magic of Innovation: New Dimensions in Linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching], Proceedings of the 2nd scientific and practical conference, Vol. 2, section 5-8, Moscow, pp. 44-49. (in Russian) Bogdanova-Beglarian, N.V. (2015b), Not gonevo but linguistic opisalovo of one colloquial word-building pattern (corpus material insight). Communication Studies, No. 1 (3), pp. 68-82. (in Russian) Bogdanova-Beglarian, N.V. (Ed.) (2014), Zvukovoi korpus kak material dlya analiza russkoi rechi [Speech Corpus as a Base for Analysis of Russian Speech], Collective Monograph, Pt. 2. Vol. 1., St. Petersburg, 396 p. (in Russian) Bybee, J. (2003), Mechanisms of Change in Grammaticization: The Role of Frequency.
The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Oxford, Blackwell Publ., pp. 602-623. Palshina, D.A. (2012), Redutsirovannye formy russkoi rechi: istoriya i perspektivy lek-sikograficheskogo opisaniya [Reduced Forms in Russian Speech: a History and Perspectives of Lexical Description], Saarbrücken, Palmarium Academic Publ., 147 p. (in Russian)
Palshina, D.A. (2013), Speech rate as a reason for reduced forms of Russian words in everyday communication. Perm University Herald. Russian and Foreign Philology, Iss. 2 (22), pp. 18-24. (in Russian) Richards, J.C. (2006), Communicative Language Teaching Today, Cambridge University Press, 50 p.
Spada, N. (2007), Communicative language teaching. Cummins, J., Davison, Ch. (Eds.)
International handbook of English language teaching, Springer, pp. 271-288. Widdowson, H. (1990), Aspects of language teaching, Oxford University Press, 213 p.
КОММУНИКАТИВНЫЙ ПОДХОД В ПРЕПОДАВАНИИ РУССКОГО ЯЗЫКА КАК ИНОСТРАННОГО: НОВЫЕ РЕСУРСЫ, НОВЫЕ ЗАДАНИЯ
Е.М. Баева
Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет (Санкт-Петербург, Россия)
Аннотация: В преподавании иностранных языков в настоящее время наиболее популярен коммуникативный подход. Его идеологи и практики согласны в том, что отдают предпочтение преподаванию беглости речи, а не ее грамматической правильности. Таким образом, особенно важным представляется найти, разработать или адаптировать такие учебно-методические материалы, которые бы максимально продуктивно подготавливали учащихся к ре-
альным жизненным коммуникативным ситуациям. Источником такого материала, по мнению автора, может стать корпус современной устной русской речи «Один речевой день», который уже не один год составляется в Санкт-Петербурге при участии автора. Вкратце описав историю создания и основные характеристики данного речевого корпуса, автор размышляет о возможностях и преимуществах применения корпусного материала в языковой аудитории. В статье разбираются некоторые фонетические, лексические, социолингвистические, дискурсивные и коммуникативные аспекты материала, представленного в аннотированном устном корпусе, которые могут быть с успехом использованы в преподавании русского языка как иностранного, чтобы обеспечить учащимся уникальную коммуникативную практику различных речевых сценариев.
Ключевые слова: методика преподавания иностранных языков, русский язык как иностранный, корпусный подход, коммуникативный подход, учебные материалы.
Для цитирования:
Баева Е.М. Коммуникативный подход в преподавании русского языка как иностранного: новые ресурсы, новые задания // Коммуникативные исследования. 2017. № 2 (12). С. 89-95. (На англ. яз.).
Сведения об авторе:
Баева Екатерина Михайловна, кандидат филологических наук, доцент кафедры английского языка
Контактная информация:
Почтовый адрес: 199034, Россия, Санкт-Петербург, Университетская наб., 11 E-mail: e.baeva@spbu.ru
Дата поступления статьи: 28.04.2017
