Learner corpora in second language teaching: a study of possessive constructions in Russian

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to demonstrate that parallel learner corpora and specifically, collections of learners' translations into L2, can not only improve the inverse translation teaching process, but also contribute to the study of the actual linguistic norm of the L2. The paper presents the first parallel learner corpus that consists of the translations from Italian into Russian made by Italian students who study the Russian language as L2 at university. The author of the present study focuses mainly on the use of some possessive constructions in the Russian language. Students’ translations are compared to the data from the National Corpus of Russian Language, on one hand, and to the results of the previously conducted studies on the category of possession, on the other. Such a contrastive analysis demonstrates the difficulties in choosing between some alternative possessive constructions depending on the context, as well as in valuating the correctness of such uses through the prism of the actual norm of the Russian language.