RSL Acquisition of People with Bulgarian, Serbian and Macedonian L1

This master’s thesis examines how native speakers of Bulgarian, Serbian and Macedonian acquire Russian as a foreign. This research compares typical mistakes of Bulgarian, Serbian and Macedonian native speakers and speakers of non-Slavic languages in their narratives in Russian as a foreign. The goal of the research is to find out how native South Slavic language (Bulgarian, Serbian and Macedonian) influences the better or worse acquisition of specific categories of Russian language. The research is based on the theory of language transfer and interlanguage. As a method of data collecting the written discourse analysis was used. Participants of the experiment (two groups of respondents) narrated a film “Pear stories” which was made by W. Chafe. Narratives were analyzed according to grammar marking method as it is presented in RLC (Russian Learning Corpora) with new tags which are necessary in this research. Results are analyzed by using Mann Whitney U test in SPSS. According to results of the research the South Slavic native speakers acquire better the verbal aspect and number, but typical mistakes for them are constructions with infinitives, negative construction with Genitive case, word order, subject omission, code switching.