Investigating the Differences Between Prepared and Spontaneous Speech Characteristics: Descriptive Approach

In the modern EFL paradigm, pre-task planning time is viewed as a norm. Pre-task planning time is one of the central concerns of teachers, test-developers, as well as researchers. Pre-task planning is planning a speech before performing a task, and it also involves rehearsal and strategic planning. The paper addresses the problem of pre-task planning advisability for A2 Russian EFL speakers. The research presented in this paper examines the structure, breakdown, repair, syntactic complexity, lexical diversity as well as the accuracy of the discourse produced by 145 Russian participants of the English language competition held in Kazan, Russia, in January 2020. The discourse analysis revealed that the pre-task time is used by A2 EFL speakers not only to focus on a dialog but also to elicit a topic text from memory, thus focusing on form rather than meaning. Hence, in A2 tests prioritizing meaning over form and measuring the ability for spontaneous speech, the one-minute pre-task planning time is viewed as questionable

Parametric Taxonomy of Educational Texts

The article is aimed at considering the issue of the discursive text typology and developing a parametric model of the elementary school texts for the ontological domain by employing a corpus-based approach and methods of linguistic statistics. The research corpus of over 90,000 tokens comprises texts of 13 textbooks acknowledged in the 2nd grade of Russian schools. The applied multifactor discriminant analysis enabled identification and validation of typological characteristics of the texts under study, offering the formula for referring educational texts to a subject domain on Philology, Mathematics, and Natural Sciences. The discriminant analysis results confirmed the hypothesis that each type of text corresponds to a parametric model, which includes six constants: the average number of words in a sentence, the average number of nouns, the average number of verbs and the average number of adjectives per sentence, local noun overlap, global argument overlap. The assessment of linguistic parameters was performed by an automatic Russian text analyzer RuLingva. The classification accuracy of the parametric model was identified as 80%, which ensures its high reliability and allows for the data obtained to be employed in linguistic expertise, as well as for in automated linguistic profiling of texts. The prospect of the research implies installation of the model in RuLingva and development of similar models for texts of other subject domains

Deictic Elements as Means of Text Cohesion and Coherence in Academic Discourse

The article presents the results of the research aimed at analyzing some functions and features of deictic elements in academic discourse in English. The material under analysis covers 20 academic texts written by English-speaking linguists. In the article it is proved that in academic discourse deictic elements can operate only within the fixed scheme of deictic coordinates, which has got three main elements: deictic center, deictic element, and antecedent/subsequent element. Out of this scheme deictic elements fail to fulfill referential procedure. All deictic elements in academic discourse are divided into two big groups: conventional deictic elements and endemic ones. The result of the research shows that conventional deictic elements in most cases provide text cohesion (within small text units, such as adjoining sentences); whereas endemic deictic elements tend to serve for text coherence (in larger text units, such as paragraphs, chapters, etc.). Thus, deictic elements can be considered important units providing text-building

THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE TEST: TOWARDS ASSESSING TEXT COMPREHENSION

Reading comprehension relies on a variety of complex skills that are not effectively assessed by existing Russian language tests. At the same time, Russian textbooks are criticized both for their low text quality and high text complexity. This study addresses issues of Russian language proficiency and comprehension assessment with the development of the Russian Language Test (RLT). The RLT was constructed to measure proficiency relevant to textbook comprehension, such as grammar and vocabulary knowledge, establishing propositional meaning and inferencing. Results from this initial study including 81 fifth-grade and 94 ninth-grade students confirm that students struggle with grammatical inferences and identifying the main idea in a text. Additionally, three standardized Russian exams, VPR, OGE, EGE are analyzed, affording an overview of the testing system for the Russian language from the elementary through high school education levels. This study demonstrates promise for the use of the RLT as a language proficiency assessment and provides a broad context for understanding the current state of Russian language tests for native speakers