The Russian National Corpus in teaching Russian and related disciplines (review)

Abstract

The electronic collection of authentic texts of the Russian National Corpus (RNC) is among the largest in the world. This free resource is representative, annotated, and accessible without registration. Moreover, the RNC is considered an essential tool for school and university teachers of Russian. However, contrary to this popular opinion often found in scientific papers, it is difficult to evaluate the extent to which educators have mastered the corpus. This review article aims to determine the relevance level of the RNC in teaching Russian and subjects related to it at all levels of the Russian educational system. The goal is achieved by analysing pertinent research literature published over the past six years. Additionally, the paper attempts to estimate the efficiency of corpus-based methods and techniques for the learning process. The search for Russian-language scientific publications was conducted with the Google Scholar web search engine and in the Russian Scientific Electronic Library (eLibrary.RU) using a set of keywords and phrases. The results demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of studies are outside the scope of this review article since they focus on teaching Russian as a foreign language or linguistic research. The final sample includes 62 papers dating between 2019 and 2024. The detailed analysis performed during the research detected a negative trend, i. e., a decline in the number of publications on this topic over the years. Moreover, only one study from the collected data described a pedago­ gical experiment, which makes it impossible to determine the effectiveness of corpus-based methods and techniques in teaching Russian. Thus, even 20 years after the launch of the RNC project, corpus-based teaching of Russian remains an extremely promising direction for both Russian language teaching methodology and modern linguistics.