The Role of Russian Spatial Preposition Structure in Russian Language Teaching

Abstract

Russian was often taught as the primary foreign language at several of China's modern foreign language colleges. The development of students' Russian language competency in reading, speaking, writing, and listening is the primary goal of such institutions. The key to mastering a language is said to be the student's understanding of Russian spatial prepositions, which represent the scene based on the spatial relationship between objects. Prepositions, however, have been shown to be challenging for Russian language learners. Prepositions in the Russian language are typically taught without explanation, with each application being taught separately to the students. Traditional prepositional teaching method is inefficient which stressed the need for effective preposition teaching approach.  To address this issue, we developed and investigated the efficacy of computer-aided three-dimensional image schemas (CTIS) for Russian spatial preposition teaching in this paper. The aim of this study is to enhance Chinese student’s Russian language proficiency by strengthening their knowledge on Russian spatial prepositions. The students learning Russian as foreign language are selected and their demographic data are collected in the initial stage. The students are categorized into two groups namely control and experimental groups. The control group received standard blackboard-based Russian spatial preposition teaching. The experimental group received CTIS-based Russian spatial preposition teaching. The data corresponding to Russian language proficiency of students before and after receiving respective session was obtained. The pre- and post-test data was analyzed by t-statistics test. Statistical data shows that control and experimental groups were significantly not different before session; but significantly different after session. This showed that CTIS-based Russian spatial preposition teaching has significantly improved learners’ knowledge on spatial prepositions and Russian language proficiency compared to traditional teaching method.