RUSSIAN-CHINESE LANGUAGE INTERFERENCE PATTERNS IN THE OLYMPIAD SECONDARY SCHOOL ESSAYS
The all-Russian school Olympiad is a massive annual event for working with gifted students in the Russian education system in different subjects including Chinese, therefore it is a rich source of information about Russian-Chinese language interference. The article presents the results of the Olympiad essays analysis aimed to determine the interference patterns reflected in hieroglyphics. The results enabled to identify the mistakes and group them into 5 categories: 1) wrong use of similar and / or omophonic characters (with 5 subcategories inside), 2) errors related to word formation patterns, 3) the use of words in wrong context (word-combination pattern violations) and wrong word choices, 4) grammatical errors (part of speech and syntactic errors), 5) punctuation errors. A number of mistake without a reasonable explanation were also found. The article gives examples of each error category and provides guidelines to help reduce their number. In addition, the Olympiad participants essays analysis enabled to find out what tools students used to make their speech figurative: sayings, idiomatic expressions, metaphors, etc., as well as what names of sights and words related to culture were mentioned in their works. The obtained results might be useful for working out the guidelines to improve Chinese as L2 teaching methods and techniques.