PLUS ONE/PLUS NONE: The Communicative Conundrum and Russian Conjugation

Teaching Russian conjugation by using the one- vs two-stem system is discussed & a new technique, "plus one/plus none," is proposed to help students of Russian as a second language overcome difficulties with the morphological complexities of the Russian verbs. Four major advantages of the proposal are identified: (1) Linguistically untrained teachers can use it in teaching Russian conjugation. (2) Stress shift & consonant mutation are recognized as playing important roles in Russian conjugation. (3) It gives students the opportunity to auditorily verify the correctness of produced verb forms & recognize verb forms occurring in real-life situations. (4) It complements the traditional approaches to Russian conjugation in textbooks. Z. Dubiel