Keyword: «contrastive analysis»

The article examines the role of Russian as a pedagogical resource in learning English. It demonstrates that controlled reference to L1 helps reduce negative interference and enhance positive transfer. Typical risk zones for Russian-speaking learners are described at phonetic, orthographic, grammatical, lexical, and pragmatic levels. The effectiveness of contrastive analysis is justified for predicting and preventing errors related to determination, aspect-tense correlation, and control. The didactic value of brief Russian-language comments, instructions, and reflection while maintaining priority on oral practice in English is shown. Functions of translanguaging and code-switching as tools for operational explanation of categories without direct equivalents in Russian are analyzed. The role of translation is reconsidered: it is interpreted as a means of targeted control over meanings and correction of calques rather than an end goal itself. A model of “balanced” use of L1 is formulated, where system comparison, focused microlessons, and bilingual tasks ensure a managed balance between interference and transfer, thereby increasing the efficiency of teaching.

The relevance of the study is due to the linguistic and cultural heterogeneity of student groups that are constantly replenished with foreign students, and the resulting linguistic and cultural heterogeneity in which Russian is the only means of communication. A uniform, undifferentiated teaching methodology does not fully take into account differences in the structure of students’ native languages, in their norms of communicative behaviour and in their ways of explicating experience. The aim of the article is to substantiate the differentiation of a foreign language audience according to a linguo-ethno-cognitive principle and to show how the nature of difficulties in learning Russian is related to the typological distance between the learner’s native language and the target language. The leading approach is the linguo-ethno-cognitive one, which combines linguistic, ethnic, cultural and cognitive components; the principal method is comparative-typological (contrastive) analysis, supplemented by typologisation and classification. As a result, the concept of a foreign-language audience is clarified, and five language groups are identified – Slavic, Turkic, Iranian, Chinese and Indian – for each of which zones of positive transfer and zones of interference are distinguished, while the interferences themselves are classified by nature into physical, physiological, psychological and semantic-conceptual ones. A consolidated gradation of the groups is constructed, according to which, as the typological distance increases, the main source of difficulty shifts from the formal level to the conceptual one, and the amount of positive transfer decreases – from maximal in the Slavic group to virtually absent in the Chinese one. The theoretical significance of the work lies in integrating scattered linguistic and methodological observations into a single graded model. Its practical significance is determined by the fact that the proposed model gives the teacher a basis for the targeted selection and presentation of teaching material according to the dominant type of difficulty for each group, as well as for developing differentiated corrective courses and diagnostic maps of typical errors.