This poster summarizes research analyzing the language development of a 13-year-old Russian English language learner who moved to the United States three years ago. While her native language is Russian, her English skills have progressed rapidly. The majority of errors in her English writing are due to influence from her first language of Russian, such as differences in syntax, lack of articles, verb conjugation, and preposition usage. The research found strong connections between her native Russian language and developing English language.

1. Veronica Scrivens
Wilkes University
ESL 502

2. Brief Student Background
This poster is a summary of data analysis and language
comparison research of 13 year old female Russian ELL
student. This student and her family moved the United
States approximately three years ago. Her English
language acquisition has been deliberate and swift.
There is a possibility that she will be tested for “gifted” in
the near future.
The majority of errors were due to inter-language
development. I propose that she will continue to develop
her English language skills to near perfection while
suffering no attrition in her native Russian language.

3. русский язык является весьма отличается от
английского.
Translation:
 The Russian language is very different than the
English language.

4. Interesting Fact 1:
The Russian language has 33 Cyrillic alphabetic
consonant phonemes and approximately 5 major
vowels (Gildersleeve-Newman and Wright, 2010).
Cyrillic alphabet Consonant phonemes

5. Interest Fact 2:
There are no homophones in the Russian
Language.

6. Interesting Fact 3:
Allwords in the Russian language are pronounced
and spelled phonetically.

7. The following are examples of student inter-
language translation errors found in writing
samples from Russian (L1) to English (L2).

8. Student Syntactical Errors
 Student Error: In a deep forest live wild cats.
 Russian Format: В условиях глубокого лесных жить
диких кошек.
 Explanation: In the Russian language, syntactical
placement of words in a sentence do not give
sentence meaning. Affixes are added to the end of
words to make sentences comprehensible.
 English Correction: Wild cats live in the deep
forest.

9. Student Errors in Article Usage
Student Error: It very beautiful town.
Russian Format: Это очень красивый город.
Explanation: In the Russian language, there are no
articles (the, an, a).
English Correction: It is a very beautiful town.

10. Student Errors in Verb Tense
Student Error: They didn’t had borders.
Russian Format: Они не имеют границ.
Explanation: In the Russian language, “Prefixation
creates verbs from nouns, adjectives or other
verbs” (Spencer and Zaretskaya, 1998).
English Correction: They didn’t have borders.

11. Student Errors in Preposition Usage
Student Error: I don’t want go.
Russian Format: Я не хочу углубляться.
Explanation: The Russian language does not
require prepositions for sentences to have
meaning.
English Correction: I don’t want to go.

12. The research and data journal analysis indicate a
strong inter-language connection between the
student’s L1 and L2. This inter-language
connection is the source of the majority of the
errors found in the ELL students writing samples.

13. Gildersleeve-Newmann, C.E. & Wright, K.L. (2010, October, English Speech
Acquisition in 3 to 5 Year Old Children Learning Russian and English.
Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, 41, 429-444.
Spencer, a. & Zaretskaya, M. (1998), Verb Prefixation in Russian as Lexical
Subordination, Linguistics, 36, 1-39.
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