Methods of Teaching Conjunctions i ‘and’, а ‘and/but’, no ‘but’ to Students of Russian as a Foreign Language  Based on Corpora Data 

Conjunctions i ‘and’, a ‘and/ but’, no ‘but’ are a widespread part of both oral and written speech. Students learning Russian as a foreign language have troubles acquiring these conjunctions, mainly because no equivalent for the conjunction a exists in their native language. To help them master these conjunctions, good methods of their teaching should be created. In this work, I use errors from the works of heritage and L2 speakers as a material for rules creation. I investigate the corpus for the incorrect conjunction usage, then divide all mistakes into clausal and non clausal, try to tell why they occurred and then classify them by the type of construction they are found in. A semantic map approach was adopted to explain some mistakes. All this is then transformed into rules for Russian as a foreign language learners. A pilot set of interactive exercises is created to help students achieve better results.