Features of the adaptationof educational migrants in the bilingual environment

Abstract

The authors of the article examine the most significant issues that are related to the peculiarities of the manifestation of interference in the closely related languages – Russian and Ukrainian. Despite the fact that official Ukrainian Studies usually consider Ukraine a single-level and monolingual state, it must be admitted that the Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism is a system-forming feature of the linguistic situation in most Ukrainian regions. The authors describe and analyze the types of difficulties that are caused by the peculiarities of interlingual interference of closely related languages, and give linguistic and methodical recommendations for overcoming such issues. Interlingual interference covers all language levels and is especially pronounced at the phonetic level since there are significant differences in the systems of vocalism and consonantism. At the phonetic level, interference appears at the early stage of developing listening and pronunciation skills. At the grammatical level, there are differences between similar Russian and Ukrainian nouns in their gender and number. Another difficulty lies in the fact that some lexical units in these two languages sound the same but have different meanings. The inability to distinguish such words causes multiple errors. Differences in the characteristics of closely related linguistic systems are also observed in speech etiquette, which is especially important when teaching a language to educational migrants. One of the possible props for overcoming interference is an active learner’s vocabulary, which should become an assistant in mastering a language. The authors hope that the recommendations outlined in the article will help to overcome the arising difficulties and make the process of teaching foreign students a second non-native language easier and more successful.