ИСТИНА

This work presents the challenges and typical mispronunciations for native speakers of some Romance languages (French, Spanish (Castilian), Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and Romanian) in regards to Russian coronal noise consonants. This part of Russian phonetic system was chosen as our research topic because it is the most prevalent one (13 phonemes out of 36 are noise coronal). In order to study this topic, we ran a linguistic experiment. First, we made predictions about the main problems that may appear in the pronunciation of the Russian sounds by the speakers of Romance languages by comparing the phonetic systems of the Romance languages with the Russian phonetic system. Next, we made a focused reading materials in Russian based on our predictions, and we gave these materials to the students, who’s native languages were one of the above mentioned Romance languages. Finally, we analysed the students’ speech, locating the main problems across languages, as well as specific features of phonetic accent of speakers of each language. The aim of the results of this work is implementation in Russian classes to guide pronunciation of students, whose native languages are from Romance group.