ИСТИНА

In this presentation I will talk about the main problems in L2 acquisition of Russian pronunciation, particularly coronal obstruents, which is one of the most loaded zones of Russian phonetic system, and one of the main obstacles for foreigners in acquiring Russian pronunciation. I am going to present a typology of foreign accent in Russian language in the domain of coronal obstruents. The typology is a result of a linguistic experiment involving 92 participants – speakers of 27 languages. I will also present an online course of Russian phonetics, based on the typology. During the course, each student is supposed to start with a series of general exercises addressing common problems. Upon completion of these exercises, each student is given further sets of exercises designed to target the difficulties commonly encountered by students of his/her language. The course is designed to be engaging and entertaining for students studying online and by themselves, and does not involve active participation of a teacher. The objective of the course is to improve listening comprehension by helping students recognize specific Russian sounds in syllables, words and sentences. It can be used at any stage of language acquisition.