Polar Questions Beyond “Listen and Repeat”: Integrating Intonational Phonology into the L2 Russian Classroom

The acquisition of prosody is commonly stated as a basic objective in L2 curricula. Despite an extensive tradition of intonational studies in L1 Russian and a rich methodological literature on L2 Russian instruction, empirical studies examining L2 Russian intonation remain very limited. In this chapter, we investigate a corpus of Russian yes/no questions produced by 39 adult Italian learners of Russian. Polar questions were chosen because of their robust prosodic marking in Standard Moscow Russian and their high communicative importance, given that Russian typically does not mark yes/no interrogatives grammatically. In contrast, regional varieties of Italian display a high degree of inter- and intra-speaker variability in the tonal configurations used to mark polar questions, offering particularly intriguing opportunities for cross-linguistic comparison. The data for the study were elicited via a gamified, semi-spontaneous production task performed in pairs. We compared speakers’ L1 and L2 productions and identified the most common scenarios of cross-linguistic influence observed in the data, such as direct transfer of the dominant L1 tune, selective transfer of a non-dominant L1 tune, and avoidance of transfer. Owing to the rich inventory of polar question tunes available in Italian, learners appear to be open to experimentation in their L2 prosody, often deviating from predictable patterns of cross-linguistic influence at the phonological (systemic) level. At the phonetic (realisational) level, however, transfer tendencies are more uniform: the instances of non-target-like pitch alignment, scaling, and tune-text negotiation strategies can be traced back to L1 influence. In the discussion, we suggest that this gamified activity can be used in L2 Russian classrooms for targeted, research-informed instruction in polar question intonation. We argue that by providing students with visually accessible feedback via freely available tools for basic acoustic analysis, instructors are more likely to raise learners’ awareness of crucial suprasegmental differences between L1 and L2. This, in turn, offers a concrete way to move beyond traditional imitation-based routines.