Erään venäjänopiskelijan harjoittelu ja kehitys venäjän kielen sibilanttien ja affrikaattojen parissa

The paper in question reports an experiment that examines the difficulties of acquiring Russian sibilant and affricate phonemes faced by a Finnish L2 learner of Russian. The experiment is based on the theoretical framework of explicit pronunciation teaching and that of contrastive analysis. The experiment itself consists of three parts: 1) phonetic testing in three phases, including tasks of both receptive and productive spoken language skills, 2) a short lesson about the features and pronunciation of the sibilants and affricates of Russian, conducted by the author, 3) independent practice by the experimentee. The analysis concentrates on finding similarities and differences between a) the pronunciation target and the sounds produced by the experimentee and b) the sounds produced in different phases. The results show that there is little improvement in the reception skills of the experimentee (6 % increase between the first and the last test), but more so in their production skills (16 %). Interestingly, while most of the mistakes made by the experimentee were anticipated on the basis of a contrastive analysis between Russian and Finnish, some tasks proved to be significantly easier than expected, for example the regocnition of the word-ini al s /ʐ/.