Teaching and learning object topicalisation in Russian as a second language

In a language such as Russian, which displays a rich morphology and a flexible syntax (cf. King 1995), an essential feature to acquire for second language (L2) learners is case. This paper broaches a puzzle: along their grammatical development, learners of Russian L2 – regardless of their L1 background and with little instruction in the L2 – begin quite early to distinguish at least between a nominative and a non-nominative form. Yet even after years of guided instruction, most learners can accurately deploy nominative and accusative case markers only in sentences with a preverbal subject and a postverbal object. Why does this happen? Pienemann’s (1998) Processability Theory (PT) can provide an answer, by offering a cognitively-based, hierarchically-staged sequence of grammatical development – from the very initial to the most advanced stages of L2 acquisition. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it will illustrate syntactic development in Russian L2 from canonical to non-canonical word order, based on PT’s Prominence Hypothesis (Pienemann, Di Biase & Kawaguchi 2005; Bettoni & Di Biase 2015). Secondly, it will present the results of a cross-sectional study of learners of Russian L2, and explain at which point of development it is effective to teach non-canonical structures such as object topicalisation.