Hesitation phenomena in an oral monologue story in a non-native language (based on the material of the Russian speech of the Chinese)

The article analyzes the Russian oral spontaneous monologue story in a non-native language. The aim of the work is a comprehensive analysis of hesitation phenomena (HP) in Russian oral monologue stories presented by Chinese speakers. The main research methods used in the work are descriptive (contextual), quantitative (simple quantitative calculations), comparative and experimental (transcription of recorded texts). The material for the analysis was taken from 20 monologues of native Chinese speakers on the topic ‘How do you spend time on vacation?’ from the corpus of Russian monologue speech created at St. Petersburg State University and known as the ‘Balanced Annotated Text Library’. The paper describes different HP in such a monologue, calculates the frequency of their occurrence; the data obtained are compared with the results of similar studies conducted based on the material of the Russian speech of the Chinese. The analysis showed that in the Russian oral monologue story delivered by the Chinese, there are present not only all the types of HP known in the scientific literature but also some phenomena peculiar only to the speech of the Chinese. Physical hesitation pauses, non-speech sounds, vowel stretches, word breaks, and repetitions- hesitations are the most typical (top 5) HP in their speech. This is consistent with the results of other studies, based on the material of both monologues-stories and other types of monologue speech (reading, retelling, description of an image). The results of the research not only contribute to the study of spontaneous oral speech and phonetics of Russian as a foreign language, but can also be useful in the practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language, especially in the Chinese audience, because they can help the Chinese to improve the effectiveness of real communication in Russian.