Teaching Grammatical Gender in Russian as Foreign Language to Spanish Learners: a Review and Didactic Recommendations

Previous studies report that grammatical gender causes difficulties for learners of second (L2) and foreign languages (FL), especially for those students whose first language does not possess this grammatical characteristic. Although Spanish and Russian share gender feature, Russian has a more complex gender system which may be difficult to acquire for Spanish-speaking students. Given that it is not clear what explicit instructions Spanish students of FL Russian receive during the acquisition process and not numerous research that study this issue, in this paper we aim to analyse three elementary level textbooks usually used to teach Russian as FL in Spain as for their presentation of grammatical gender. The textbook analysis revealed differences between the presentation of noun endings of each gender and the activities employed in practicing gender agreement. Notable similarities between three textbooks were found in their lack of: i) natural and grammatical gender distinction, ii) noun endings frequency statistics, iii) explicit reference to the Spanish gender system. The didactic recommendations that emerge from the present study are the following: the explicit instructions should focus on the distinction between natural and grammatical gender, the reference to Spanish gender and the most relevant endings for non-canonical nouns, and noun endings frequency statistics should be provided.