Typology of mistakes in unprepared reading in Russian as foreign language (on material of speech of the Chinese)

The article reviews errors in the Russian speech of the Chinese people. The occurrence of such errors is associated, on the one hand, with the general spontaneity (unprepar- edness) of oral speech, on the other hand, with limited knowledge of a non-native language by the informants, with an insufficient level of proficiency in this language. The paper attempts to construct a typology of errors in reading monologues recorded by native Chinese speakers. Four types of errors are identified: accentological (poldEn ’, rEka, sverhU), lexico-grammatical (nadeval instead of nadevaja, stiraju instead of stirala), creation of quasiwords (devjacha instead of davecha, predtosla instead of predstojala) and contamination of phonetic and lexical-grammatical mistakes (slEpaja muzykant instead of slepoj muzykant). As a result, it turned out that the quality of reading is influenced by both the content of the initial stimulus (lexical and grammatical set of units) and the individual characteristics of the informants: the level of Russian language proficiency, gender and psychotype. When facing with difficult words in a text, informants unconsciously extract the closest units from their mental vocabulary, and often a replacement mechanism is triggered for them, leading to various errors. Elimination of reading errors is possible by expanding the students’ vocabulary, improving the knowledge of Russian grammar, as well as developing the skills and abilities of reading itself as a type of speech activity.