Integrating the concept of Aktionsart into the teaching of Russian verbal aspect

Abstract This paper evaluates a pedagogical intervention targeting verbal aspect selection in L2 Russian through explicit reflection on the role of Aktionsart. In some contexts, aspect in native use is mainly determined by this category, which, however, is hardly part of L2 Russian syllabi. In this study, 99 Italian learners of L2 Russian were divided into an experimental and a control group. The control group followed the standard syllabus, while the experimental group participated in a metalinguistic discussion on the interaction between aspect and Aktionsart. All the participants were then asked to select the appropriate aspectual value in a set of 32 sentences manipulated with respect to Aktionsart and various types of aspectual cues. To verify to what extent the pedagogical intervention shifted the respondents’ choices away from the default behaviour instantiated by the control group, associating the expression of completed events to the PF aspect, the experimental group completed the task again after a year. At the second test time, the participants were also asked to translate 12 Russian sentences into Italian and justify their choice of aspectual forms. The experimental group demonstrated greater sensitivity to the role of Aktionsart in contexts that lacked aspectual cues, even though they failed to explicitly describe its role. Altogether, the pedagogical intervention seemed to exert a beneficial effect on the learners’ ability to select the most prototypical aspectual value but not on their ability to justify their choice.