Two Types of Exercises (Generation and Mistake Correction), a Comparing the Effectiveness of Generation Exercises and Mistake correction Exercises in Teaching Students Russian as a Foreign Language

The present experimental study was aiming to answer two main research questions: 1. Do generation exercises outperform the mistake correction ones in terms of their efficacy in teaching Russian to foreign students? 2. Are mistake correction exercises linked to hypercorrection? Two series of experiments were conducted. The first experiment (N = 16, p-value = 0.035) showed that mistake correction exercises are indeed less effective than the generation ones in teaching foreign learners new language material (Russian irregularly spelled words were used as a target language material). Experiment-1 consisted of three phases. Firstly, simple visual memory pretest took place in order to divide all the participants into two subsamples balanced by its results. Then the training phase began. Each subsample had to learn the spelling of several Russian irregularly spelled words by completing exercises of a particular type. The exercises looked like complete sentences in Russian with a target word highlighted. The first subsample had to complete exercises by filling in the gaps in target words with a correct letter. The second subsample needed to find and correct the mistakes in the spelling of target words (not all the instances had a misspelt word). Each task was followed with a demonstration (both visual and oral) correct answer. The final phase consisted of a short dictation containing all the target words. The score for this dictation was used to assess how many words did participants manage to learn over the course of this experiment. Besides completing the tasks in the second phase participants were required to rate how sure they are about their answers. This simple measure helped to find out that mistake correction exercises are indeed linked to the hypercorrection effect. The second subsample had significantly lower level of confidence on average (p-value = 0.0001) while the percentage of erroneous answers given by both subsamples during the training phase was very similar. In the second part of this study the pilot experiment on a similar topic was carried out. Its goal was to test the main hypothesis on the new language material – the irregularly formed genitive plural of 8 Russian nouns. It turned out that due to the lack of visual correcting instructions, a big amount of possible answers, only one of which was correct, and overall linguistically diverse target material the participants did not manage to learn a significant percentage of word forms in the short period of time. The results of both of these experiments can be used to further investigate the topic of the efficacy of mistake correction exercises in teaching Russian as a foreign language.