Academic writing proficiency of Russian heritage speakers: A comparative study

This chapter focuses on two areas that distinguished the writing of heritage learners of Russian from that of native speakers: The formation of complex sentences through relative clause constructions and the use of temporal cohesive devices. Like other heritage language learners, Russian heritage learners’ initial oral/aural proficiency distinguishes them from students of Russian as a foreign language. Studies of the spoken language of Russian heritage learners in the United States have noted both grammatical and pragmatic deviations from standard Russian, including heavy lexical borrowing from English, semantic extension and syntactic translation from English, reduction of cases, and overuse of informal terms of address. If a mixed group of students were to be offered a class that focuses on a narrowly defined goal, such as learning to use academic level syntax in their writing, they may be able to work together.