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The article continues a series of studies dedicated to teaching the Ukrainian language to foreign students who either know or have experience in studying Russian. This group comprises foreigners from post-Soviet countries, as well as foreign master’s and postgraduate students who previously studied in Ukrainian higher education institutions in Russian. In compliance with the Law on Education, they are now studying Ukrainian or learning it as the state language of their current country of study. The mastery of a new foreign language, as is commonly known, is built upon existing speaking experience, which determines the methodological necessity of comparing the systems of the known language with the language being studied. Such a comparative analysis allows the identification of common features in both languages and facilitates the application of previously acquired knowledge and skills in learning a new foreign language. Interference, understood as the interaction of different language systems, directly impacts the acquisition of a new language system. The foundation for studying and regulating interference processes lies in the contrastive approach. Contrastive linguistics aims to identify differences and similarities between modern languages, aiding in determining the directions of interference and explaining the cause of typical errors. In our previous articles, we explored interference effects when Russian-speaking foreigners studied the Ukrainian language, focusing on phonetics, grammar, and syntax. These studies involved a comparative analysis of the functional-communicative organization of sentences, exemplified by the examination of ways to express subject-predicate relations in Ukrainian and Russian. Functional-communicative grammar emphasizes the pivotal role of syntax as a system that organizes all other language levels. It views a sentence from a communicative organizational perspective as an utterance formed according to a specifically defined structural scheme, with the structural core being the predicate. The predicate designates specific positions for the participants in the situation described by the proposition (subject names or actants) and their quantity. The proposed article investigates various types of extenders for the predicative centre of sentences, considers primary methods of expressing object, meaning, and circumstantial relations in both simple and complex sentences, and highlights key differences in expressing these relations between Ukrainian and Russian. These differences merit the attention of Russian-speaking learners to prevent interference errors. The methodical recommendations provided herein may prove beneficial to teachers and methodologists in developing training programs, crafting textbooks, and designing teaching materials for Ukrainian language instruction tailored to specific groups of foreign learners. They also serve as valuable resources for novice teachers in preparing for practical classes.

The study has blossomed form our observation that middle school students experience great difficulties when it comes to understanding and using the tense 'plus-que-parfait' in accordance with other tenses. We carried out an experiment with Algerian students of 3rd year middle school in order to show interest in using the Arabic language in the acquisition of tenses of verbs in French. The contrastive approach used, based on simultaneous presentation of the 'plus-que-parfait- and its equivalent in Arabic, corroborated our hypotheses from the start and showed valid results.

The paper analyses English sentences with thematic locative subjects. These subjects were detected as translation counterparts of Czech sentenceinitial locative adverbials realized by prepositional phrases with the prepositions do (into), na (on), v/ve (in), z/ze (from) complemented by a noun. In the corresponding English structure, the initial scene-setting adverbial is reflected in the thematic subject, which results in the locative semantics of the subject. The sentences are analysed from syntactic, semantic and FSP aspects. From the syntactic point of view, we found five syntactic patterns of the English sentences with a locative subject (SV, SVA, SVO, SVpassA and SVCs) that correspond to Czech sentences with initial locative adverbials. On the FSP level the paper studies the potential of the sentences to implement the Presentation or Quality Scale. Since it is the “semantic content of the verb that actuates the presentation semantics of the sentence” (Duškova, 2015a: 260), major attention is paid to the syntactic-semantic structure of the verb. The analysis of the semantics of the English sentences results in the identification of two semantic classes of verbs which co-occur with the English locative subject.

The aim of the present paper is to briefly illustrate and assess the main uses of intensifiers and intensification in English and Romanian, trying to hint at the complexity of the phenomenon in the two languages, while sketchily suggesting ways to improve the teaching and learning activities in Romanian schools, as well as much of the activity of translators in this country. The authors’s illustrative treatment tackles the broader sphere of intensification, not only such intensifiers as very, terribly, awfully, really, definitely, kind of. The main subsections of the paper deal, respectively, with semantic aspects, word formation, syntactic aspects, stylistic issues, and a few remarks on usage.

RESUMEN: El presente artículo pretende ofrecer una sistematización en lo que atañe al régimen preposicional en dos lenguas afines: español e italiano. Por ello, el trabajo se inscribe dentro de un marco didáctico, con el objeto de brindar a todo docente de español algunas pautas metodológicas de interés e utilidad a la hora de abordar el tema en la clase de E/ LE. Para nuestros propósitos, pasaremos someramente revista a los estudios contrastivos más emblemáticos con los que contamos y, a continuación, para nuestro análisis, adoptaremos un enfoque contrastivo y traductológico (español-italiano), con miras a encuadrar la cuestión en un ámbito específico y determinar hasta qué punto las dos lenguas estudiadas guardan parentesco desde el punto de vista sintáctico y morfológico. ABSTRACT: This article aims to offer a systematization with regard to the prepositional system in two related languages: Spanish and Italian. To this end, this study adopts a didactic framework in order to provide every teacher of Spanish with useful methodological guidelines when it comes to addressing this grammar point with students in an SSL class. For our purposes, we will analyze the most important studies on this subject and we will then adopt a contrastive and translation approach (Spanish-Italian), in order to frame the question within a specific field and determine to what extent the two languages are related from a syntactic and morphological point of view.

The present paper aims at stressing the need for applied linguistics in dealing with didactic and lexicographical instruments, not only in the traditional manner, but also – or mainly – in the novel modalities suggested and allowed by the new information and communication technologies, concepts and devices. Proceeding from the contrastive and didactic view of the lexicon and the lexicographer’s task, and also taking advantage of the various models that good learner’s dictionaries in use have already set, the author presents the main aspects involved by compiling a complex, grammaticized Romanian-English dictionary – in fact, one of a larger series projected. In such a complex / grammaticized Romanian-English dictionary, meant as a polyfunctional, flexible, ready-to-use tool of learning, based on an interconnective approach blending the semantic description proper and the grammatical regimen, every relevant item is explained in terms of grammatical usage, and relevant diverging data about morphological markers and irregularities, collocation and syntactic rules, pronunciation, spelling are provided, as well as a number of frequent Romanian proper names with their English equivalents. To do that, an accessible code-system was used. The material that was used as illustrations in the present approach was provided by the author’s experience as a lexicographer and teacher. Similarly, the development is proposed of interactive, software implements usable by advanced students, and also by translators and teachers of ESL; such devices can be a valuable help, a kind of learn-while-working instruments, combining the classical dictionary and the grammar manual, plus the efficiency and rapidity of modern ICT. After mentioning and illustrating the main problems related to the lexicon within the field of TEFL (viz. contrastive semantics, collocation, anomalous grammatical forms, divergent spelling and pronunciation, divergent phraseological and syntactic structures, idiom, proper nouns, lexical and semantic fields, synonymy and related terms), the author goes on to present the main priorities implied by the complex dictionary mentioned above (which is ready for print), and then a synopsis of the experience represented by the compilation of a pair of pocket-size bilingual dictionaries, and the main aspects of the activity in the field of applied linguistics that is involved by the lexicographer’s efforts. To this were added similar illustrations, the fruits of the author’s personal experience and reflective writing, meant to provide part of the database usable for furthering this didactic endeavour.

In the past (and today as well), the contrastive approach was often used when teaching foreign languages. After the communicative approach became the most popular one for teaching foreign languages, the question emerged, whether the contrastive approach is meaningful and necessary.