Word Order of German-Speaking Students in the Russian Language

The word order in Russian is one of the most difficult topics for students of Russian as a foreign language and even advanced learners often make mistakes in this theme. This study will be interesting for both teachers of Russian as a foreign language and theoretical linguists in the field of Discourse and SLA. For my research I use the data from the Russian Learner Corpus (RLC) (the total amount of texts produced by German speakers is 223) and 19 transcriptions of spoken Heritage Russian in Germany. I provide a classification of the most typical word order mistakes of German-speaking students in Russian and find out the reasons of them, suggest a set of rules and an explicit explanation, that will be easy to understand for foreign students and help them to correct the mistakes. As a result I create a set of word-order exercises for foreign students. Thus, my research paper contains a big theoretical part where I provide the background information, the corpus data analysis and a practical part with a set of word order exercises for foreign students.