Microstructure of narratives written by Chinese learners of Russian

The study examines the microstructural Russian narrative competence of native Chinese speakers studying Russian outside the Russian-speaking environment. The relevance of the study stems from the need for an in-depth analysis of the mechanisms underlying the development of written speech production in a foreign language and the identification of specific difficulties of Chinese learners producing written narratives. The research is aimed at identifying the key microstructural characteristics of Chinese students’ written narratives, classify their typical deviations from the Russian linguistic norm, and establish systematic links between microstructural features and different types of errors. The material includes 60 narratives produced by Chinese learners during an experiment with MAIN. The methodology combined quantitative and qualitative approaches: microstructural features markup, error classification, statistical procedures, and correlation analysis. The results show that text length does not correlate with the number of errors, whereas low lexical diversity is associated with higher error frequency. The research demonstrates that the most problematic area is morphology; the most frequent errors include “frozen” initial and oblique forms, and errors in aspect, case, and gender. Graphic errors are also frequent and are caused by indistinction of consonant pairs and an underdeveloped orthographic word image. Lexical difficulties primarily concern verbs of motion. Correlation analysis reveals stable error clusters that reflect different sublevels of acquisition of the target language system. The written speech of Chinese learners outside the language environment is characterized by certain difficulties which are not typical for other learners of Russian as a foreign language. The findings may enhance teaching, particularly in the aspect of paradigms, verb aspects, and verbs of motion.