(853) LANGUAGE TRANSFER AS A DEVICE FOR TEACHING ITALIAN TO RUSSIAN NATIVE SPEAKERS FAMILIAR WITH ENGLISH

摘要

Despite a small amount of research on third language acquisition, it has been proved that sometimes learners transfer some of their previous language knowledge, not only from their first language (L1), but also from their second language (L2), when learning a third language. In this article, the authors attempted to pursue the following aims: Firstly, to understand what aspects of the English language may prove useful for teachers of Italian as a third language to Russian native speakers, in the context of Kazan Federal University (KFU), Russian Federation. Secondly, to describe in what ways these aspects could be used effectively in class to help students when learning their third language worldwide. At KFU, the Italian language is taught as a second foreign language after English to students specializing in philology, translation, and interpreting. Students speak Russian as their native language and have at least a pre-intermediate level of English. In the first part of this article the authors showed the results of a survey conducted on a group of students of KFU to understand how they perceive the typological distance between their native language, their second (English) language and third (Italian) language. In the second part, the authors provided some recommendations on the way English could be used in class to help students in learning Italian as a third language. They focused on those aspects of grammar and vocabulary where English was perceived closer to Italian according to the survey. The research data, which has been collected using traditional methods of observation - contrastive analysis, questionnaire, induction and deduction - allowed the authors to outline the aspects of the English language that may trigger or constrain language transfer when teaching Italian as a second foreign language. For example, the Russian language does not contain articles in its parts of speech, however the English language does. Thus, there is no need to pay special attention to the functions of articles in the Italian language and a teacher may instead focus solely on its specific uses. Here English may become a useful device for facilitating the process of learning Italian. The authors came to the conclusion that language transfer is indeed a powerful language learning strategy. Among the teacher’s roles, the researchers cater for helping students to take advantage of prior language knowledge to improve the learning of a new foreign language.