A SYSTEMATIC COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TEACHING ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN AS FOREIGN LANGUAGES

Zhang Jing

In the context of global multilingual education, English and Russian, two languages with broad international influence but fundamentally different in type, demonstrate strikingly contrasting teaching and learning processes. Based on linguistic typology and the theory of second language acquisition, this article systematically compares the differences between English and Russian in grammatical systems, pedagogical traditions, and cognitive tasks for students. The results show that as an analytical language, English teaching focuses on communicative functions and the development of pragmatic competence; while Russian, being a synthetic language, gives priority to the accurate mastery of its morphological and syntactic system. International students face major difficulties in learning English due to the divergence of phonetics and spelling, time complexity, and pragmatic and cultural diversity.; On the contrary, students of the Russian language face such problems as differentiation of meanings by stress transfer, complexity of the case system and deep cultural coding. This article proposes a "method of contrastive learning" and a "strategy for interlanguage positive transfer", which advocate the creation of a bi-directional educational learning model based on respect for significant differences between languages. This is aimed at improving the effectiveness of teaching and the intercultural communicative competence of students. This study provides theoretical recommendations and practical ways to develop foreign language curricula, compile textbooks, and train teachers.

Keywords:teaching English; teaching Russian; comparing the typology of languages; barriers to learning a second language; contrasting teaching methods; intercultural communication