Overview of presentations on the functional grammar held at the 7th International scientific conference «Text: Problems and perspectives. Aspects of research with the purpose of teaching Russian as a foreign language»

This publication is a review of reports made at the section “Functional Grammar and Text in the Aspect of Teaching Russian as a Foreign Language” at the conference “Text: Problems and Prospects. Aspects of Learning to Teach Russian as a Foreign Language”, which was held on November 28–30, 2019 at the Faculty of Philology of M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University. Reports presented the conference were related to the development and methods of teaching Russian as a foreign language. The reports were devoted to both theoretical and practical issues. The presenters examined specific lexical and grammatical phenomena of the Russian language (verbal aspects, locative constructions and constructions with substitute verbs, indefinite pronouns, saturative verbs, interrogative sentences) both in theoretical aspect and with regard to teaching practice; discussed general language categories (referentiality, communicativeness); described linguistic theories (generative grammar, construction grammar, functional-communicative approach), proposed complexes of exercises for teaching certain linguistic phenomena and gave methodical guidelines. They analyzed the phenomenon of linguistic interference and language didactic methodology. The Russian language was compared with genetically close (Serbian) and typologically distant (Lezgi, Chinese) languages. Particular attention was paid to the text in various aspects: as an object of study (texts generated by foreign students), an object of teaching/learning (development of educational texts, textual exercises), a linguistic phenomenon (grammatical phenomena at the text level). The reports presented at the conference contributed to the development of the theoretical principles of the functional grammar, enriched the practical potential of the theory and methodology of the Russian as a foreign language teaching, and proposed solutions to widely discussed problems.