Assessment of the Russian language in the aspect of logic-illogicality by teachers of Russian as a foreign language

In an earlier associative experiment with teachers of Russian as a foreign language (RFL), the opposition ‘logicality - illogicality' was highlighted in their reactions, which became the basis for considering its realisation in speech. The aim of the study is to analyse the evaluative judgments of Russian language teachers about the logicality - illogicality, comprehensibility - uncomprehensibility, complexity - simplicity of the Russian language. The research corpus consisted of fragments with the component ‘language' and evaluative units directly and indirectly related to the attributes ‘logicality - illogicality', ‘comprehensibility - uncomprehensibility', ‘complexity - simplicity'. The material for the study was taken from the professional chat room ‘RFL Talks Methodology', created in the messenger Telegram in 2020 for the exchange of experience between RFL teachers. In the course of sampling the utterances, a tendency of combining the evaluation of the Russian language by Russian language teachers with the evaluation of students was revealed, which we consider as a communicative strategy of pedagogical discourse. The analysis is conducted within the framework of a broad syntax, based on which the utterance is interpreted both structurally and meaningfully. In conditionally negative evaluative opinions (about illogicality) impersonal sentences prevail, evaluative predicates are classified into semantic groups ‘complexity of the explanation process', ‘concealment of difficulties', ‘sympathy for learners', ‘inaccessibility of understanding', etc. The means of expressing conditionally negative evaluation are mainly verbs, verb phraseological phrases and verbal nouns containing a ‘high degree' of evaluativeness. The graphic component serves as a means of reducing categoricality, self-irony and irony. Statements with a conditionally positive evaluation (about logicality) are few in number, in terms of content there is an appeal to the system of language and the regularity of processes in it. This group of statements is often characterised by the modality of indignation towards the oppositional opinion. The cases under consideration reflect the speaker's experience and competences