Pronouns in Russian as a foreign language textbooks for the Turkmen school: teaching features and methodological approaches

Abstract

The pronominal subsystem of Russian forms one of the most persistent sources of interference for Turkmen schoolchildren, because the divergences between the two languages affect not peripheral but core grammatical parameters – the category of gender, the means of expressing possession, and the type of inflection. Turkmen, a member of the Turkic agglutinative group, lacks grammatical gender and builds case and possessive meanings through the regular attachment of affixes, whereas the Russian pronoun relies on third-person gender differentiation, the suppletive declension of personal forms, and the prothetic «n» after a preposition. The aim of the study is to determine how these divergences are reflected in the Russian-as-a-foreign-language teaching materials addressed to the Turkmen school and which methodological solutions reduce the interference load. The comparative-typological and componential analysis, content analysis of teaching units, and a systematization of typical errors are applied. It is established that the order in which the classes are introduced and the density of training material in the current manuals are weakly aligned with the real hierarchy of difficulties: the possessive «svoj», the reflexive «sebja», and the gender binding of the forms «on, ona, ono» are presented earlier than the learner masters the supporting category of gender, while the share of tasks on prepositional pronominal combinations with «n» remains disproportionately low. The mismatch between the order of presenting pronominal material and the gradient of cross-linguistic distance means that the difficulty is concentrated not so much in the forms themselves as in the moment of their methodological presentation; reconfiguring this sequence yields a greater effect than a mere increase in the volume of exercises.