Structuralist Roots of the Traditional Instruction of Russian Verbs of Motion

Does the “Directionality-Based Approach” Fit to the Russian L2 Classroom?

Abstract

Russian unprefixed verbs of motion (UVoMs) have been commonly recognized as one of the most challenging topics in Russian second language (L2) instruction. The traditional way of conceptualizing and teaching UVoMs, based on the rather ambiguous category "directionality" (cf. Isačenko, 1960), has recently been challenged by some linguists and Russian L2 educators proposing alternative approaches (cf. Bernitskaїa, 2017; 2019; Six, 2019; Bondarenko, 2023). From an epistemological perspective, the paper clarifies the linguistic principles underlying the traditional directionality-based approach to evaluate its potential efficiency in L2 classrooms. The paper demonstrates that the traditional approach is deeply rooted in the tenets of European structural linguistics, which a priori considers any grammatical category as a privative opposition. Searching for universal semantic invariants associated with specific morphemes, structuralist linguistics abstracts from contextual factors and fails to provide an easily applicable guide to choosing the correct UVoM. In contrast, the alternative approaches, such as Semantic Labeling (Bondarenko, 2023), are situation based, item-focused, and experience-driven. Converging with the principles of cognitive linguistics, they seem to be able to make up for the shortcomings of the traditional approach and offer a more intuitive methodology for teaching UVoMs.