Many children who are native speakers of foreign languages study in Moscow Oblast schools. Russian is a foreign language for them. The major difficulty such students face is written speech in Russian. This study aims to identify errors in their written speech and to analyse the obtained results. The respondents were the P class students in the 4th year of Domodedovo Secondary School No. 12 named after V. D. Presnov. They represented the near abroad, as well as Bashkortostan and Dagestan. The material for the study was the schoolchildren’s written works (essays and expositions) produced at the end of the 2022/2023 academic year. The papers were analysed and quantitatively processed. The research results indicate that the most frequent errors in the written speech of native speakers of foreign languages are spelling, punctuation, and phonetic-graphic mistakes. The reasons for the specified errors include the lack of reading skills in Russian and language transfer. Lexical and grammatical mistakes tend to decrease since early education of children in the multicultural environment of the Russian primary school enables error minimisation. It has been proved that a special role is performed by teachers who have certain teaching experience and are familiar with the methodology basics of teaching Russian as a foreign language.

The study is relevant as it is necessary to methodologically comprehend modern practices of linguistic local history studies. Additionally, there is a need for expanding the range of factual material sources for organising such work. This article aims, firstly, to characterise the multimedia electronic system "Northern Village Subdialect" (https:// borbushino.vogu35.ru/). It was created by Vologda Oblast dialectologists based on the speech recordings of residents of historical Belozerye. Another goal consists in understanding the experience of linguistic and local history work and determining the prospects for its continuation drawing on the data from the "Northern Village Subdialect" system. The methodological basis of such work is the regionally determined concept of national identity formation, especially in relation to "strong local identity" regions which include the Vologda Oblast. The main results of our research are the description of the electronic resource "Northern Village Subdialect" and its practical application to linguistic local history studies at higher education, secondary general and vocational education institutions, as well as institutions of additional education and culture in Vologda and Vologda Oblast. Working with this electronic resource enables a comprehensive understanding of local speech content in the context of preserving the cultural identity of the region. Such activities also make it possible to familiarise the largest possible community of users of the electronic multimedia system with local history work. Moreover, it expands teachers’ research and creative use of authentic speech material, which, in turn, will contribute to the emergence of innovative methods for storing and interpreting data of the dialect system of the Russian national language.

The article discusses the grammatical aspect of learning personal pronouns in the Russian language. Studying the specific features of their use in the first year of ontogenesis sheds light on the formation of predicative relations, the agreement (coordination) mechanism of the subject and the predicate, the development of types and forms of the subject and the predicate. The paper traces the stages of predication involving personal pronouns. In particular, it examines the prerequisites for coordination and identifies the typical properties of Ya- / I-, ty- / you- and on- / he-utterances in children’s speech. The material for the analysis is three longitudinal corpora of audio and video recordings (70 hours) of dialogic interaction between adults and typically developing young children. Spontaneous speech was transcribed and coded in accordance with international standards. The study has shown that predicative relations develop from a syncretic representation of the subject and predicate components to a disjunct one, from the absence of formal agreement between them to its presence, from the verbless use of personal pronouns to the verbal one. The common and individual features of the functioning of utterances with personal pronouns in the informants’ speech are confirmed statistically.

The paper considers a pre-emigration poem by G. Ivanov which has not yet been the subject of a detailed study although some of its intertextual connections were specified in existing commentaries. The work aims to analyse the poem combining two approaches: intertextual (identification of external contexts) and linguopoetic (description of the role of linguistic units of different levels in revealing the inner world of the text, in creating its spatiotemporal organisation, in expressing the subject and the addressee). Using the techniques of slow reading, linguistic commentary, and semantic and intertextual motif analysis, the article shows that the poem lexis is grouped into quite distinct semantic fields ("Death", "Love", "Breathing", "Fate", "Memory" and others). The fields are related to each other according to the principle of comparison and opposition. Moreover, the study reveals the implicit poetry writing motif (in the context of the poet’s death) connected with intertextual contexts of the Breathing semantic thread. The study shows the ambiguity of the subject and addressee references, key images, spatial and temporal planes which can be interpreted fundamentally differently. Taking into account the correlation between the external and internal contexts, the paper suggests that one context which influences the comprehension of the analysed poem is the concrete historical one, which enables readers to see the reflection of real events ("the noise of time") in the text.

The study aims to perform a semantic-semiotic analysis of the symbol "Golgotha" in M. A. Bulgakov’s novel "The Master and Margarita" in the light of the theory of suggestion. The symbol "Golgotha" consists of a signifier, i. e. the perceptual image of Golgotha, and a signified, namely three biblical symbolic meanings: ‘head’ (Adam’s in the Bible), ‘punishment’, and ‘absolution’. By suggestion in a literary text, we will mean the energy of semantic attraction between the signifier and the signified of a symbol. This is the impact of the writer’s persuasion on the reader (E. V. Shelestyuk) which is feasible since some linguistic units are polysemantic and include semantic overtones in the lexical meaning within a micro- or macro-context (B. A. Larin, G. O. Vinokur). The main research method employed is the superimposition of suggestion in the literary text under consideration on the semantic-semiotic structure of the "Golgotha" symbol. The study identifies three symbolic models implemented in the text with the aid of linguistic units. The main semantic tension arises between the perceptual image of Bald Mountain and the bald (balding) characters of the novel, as well as those characters whose heads also experienced something. Such suggestion is based on the foregrounding of the inner form of the word Golgotha (‘a bald skull’) and implements the symbolic model ‘Golgotha → Head’. The signifier of this model is expressed not only by the toponym Bald Mountain, the words bald (Russian lysyy, lys), bald spot (Russian lysina), bald-headed (Russian oblysevshii), balding (Russian lyseyushchii), baldpate (Russian pleshivyi), thinning (Russian zhidkii), skull (Russian cherep), head (Russian golova), but also by the names of the novel characters, i. e. the bearers of this feature. The second and third suggestion lines implement the symbolic models ‘Golgotha → Punishment, death’ and ‘Golgotha → Absolution’. Many characters in the book are punished to a greater or lesser extent, and most of them are forgiven. The signified "punishment" is represented by a thematic group of words and phrases whose lexical meaning includes the seme of punishment or death. The Bald Mountain features are symbolically transferred to the rocky platform of Pilate’s eternal imprisonment, Stravinsky’s clinic, and Woland’s globe. The signified "forgiveness" is expressed by the words forgive (Russian prostit’), forgiven (Russian proshchennyi), and mercy (Russian miloserdie).

The article examines the potential of the word-formation pattern of derivatives with the prefix po- and the suffixes -оmu(-еmu), -i, as well as the semantic features of adverbs formed from relative and qualitative adjectives. The word-formation meaning ‘manner of action’ in the group of adverbs formed from relative adjectives is realised as a reference comparison: po-zhenski – kak zhenshchina (English like a woman). The limited potential for deriving adverbs from qualitative adjectives is explained by the fact that not all of them form the manner of action meaning. For example, the derivatives po-novomu (English in a new way), po-staromu (English as before), po-prostomu (English in lay terms, simply), and others fully express the corresponding meaning. Adverbs with the dictionary label colloquial do not have a clearly formed meaning and a specific place in the system of qualitative adverbs. The units of the analysed word-formation pattern are also considered together with adverbs belonging to the same word family. The study notes similarities and differences of adverbs with the root prost- such as prosto (English simply, just), po-prostomu (English in lay terms, simply), poprostu (English in simple terms, just), zaprosto (English without ceremony, easily), prosto-naprosto (English simply, nothing less than).

The article reflects on the experience of working on those comments on the Total Dictation texts which concern the use of punctuation marks. Moreover, the study analyses the results of correcting dictations over a ten-year period. The analysis of specific cases from practice shows why variation arises in the proposed texts, what rules are especially difficult for participants in the educational event, and what gaps in reference books Total Dictation reveals. Thus, the main reasons for permissible (not leading to a lower mark) variation are a) rule formulations including the words mogut (mozhet) (English can/may), obychno (English usually), kak pravilo (English as a rule), facultativno (English optionally); b) the possibility of different semantic and communicative division of a particular construction. The varying degrees of participants’ rule internalisation sometimes results in applying better internalised rules to cases that are not applicable to these rules. Comparison of the Total Dictation texts with reference books shows that the latter do not prescribe some frequent normative spellings accepted by literate native speakers. All these observations can be useful both when compiling school teaching and learning materials and when preparing a new Russian punctuation rule book, as well as reference books based on it.

The relevance of studying linguistic means used to represent the categories of community/otherness is justified by the significance of this social phenomenon constructed by society and the individual in accordance with the norms of a particular (i. e. Russian) culture. The attention of modern linguistics to the "person in language" issue has determined the anthropocentric approach to language study, which implies a rethinking of linguistic objectives when examining the category of identity. The focus of the study is the linguistic means of the Russian language representing the category of community/otherness with the lexemes svoi (English our own) / inoi (English other) / chuzhoi (English alien). The article aims to study the conceptual sphere of the lexemes svoi, chuzhoi, inoi within the framework of Russian linguoculture. The research methodology includes several stages: 1) statistical data analysis; 2) linguo-cognitive analysis of the use of the lexemes; 3) creation of an experimental microtext corpus. In the experimental part, we conducted a corpus study with a subsequent analysis of the statistical indicators of the occurrences of the lexemes in texts, as well as semantic analysis. Linguo-cognitive analysis of the use of the lexemes in proverbs and clichéd expressions enabled us to determine the conceptual meanings and environment of each lexeme. During the work, a research corpus was created. It contained contexts with the phrase we do not leave our own obtained from the Russian mass media. Using the PoS tagger RNNTagger, we processed and analysed the texts, and then the material was quantitatively and statistically characterised. The study results enabled us to draw conclusions about the frequency and conceptual meanings of the lexemes svoi, chuzhoi, inoi. Moreover, they expanded the understanding of the conceptual sphere of these linguistic units and made a certain contribution to the scientific understanding of Russian linguoculture.

The article examines the functional potential, subject matter, content, and linguistic specific features of oral stories-memories of native speakers of Kuban subdialects of their childhood years (the 30, 40, 50, 60, 70s of the twentieth century). The main corpus of texts was collected through the field method within the framework of dialectological expeditions (2005–2023). Textual analysis, thematic classification, and linguistic commentary on linguistic facts were used to analyse the language material. The study shows that the subject matter and content of old Kuban residents’ oral childhood memories reflect the local cultural tradition, which, while organically fitting into the national cultural context, has peculiarities determined by the specific features of the region as a Cossack land. We describe recurring plots which appear due to life circumstances common to this dialect community. The research has also established the functional potential of childhood memories in terms of identifying conceptual meanings of individual concepts. It is demonstrated that the Kuban dialect is an important component of the local cultural tradition. The storytellers learnt it in the childhood, and it remains a natural means of communication for most of them. The analysis of the linguistic features of the memories shows a consistent manifestation of dialectal features at all linguistic levels, which enables us to recognise the informants’ stories about their childhood as one of the effective ways of preserving the dialect. The conclusion notes the scientific potential of oral memories of childhood as valuable materials for multidimensional analysis of the childhood phenomenon, as well as for studying such a unique phenomenon as linguistic genetic memory which preserves dialect not only in space but also in time. Additionally, the article focuses on the didactic potential of the analysed texts. Familiarisation with such materials during Russian language, history, and library lessons, as well as homeroom periods will contribute to strengthening generational continuity. Moreover, it will enhance ethnic identity formation and involvement in the family history of people whose destinies shape the history of the country and the nation.

Thematic index of the papers published in the "Russian Language at School" journal in 2024