RUTELA AS A TOOL FOR REVEALING THE POTENTIAL OF UKRAINIAN SCHOOLCHILDREN WHEN STUDYING GERMAN IN AUSTRIA

Abstract

This article is devoted to the RUTELA project, within the framework of which criteria have been developed that determine the possibilities and potential of a child for the development of German written speech competence. The relevance of this topic is due to the situation, as a result of which more than 10,000 school-age children ended up in Austria and were forced to integrate into the Austrian school system, learn a new foreign language for the majority, and adapt to a new team and teachers. The purpose of this study is to identify the potential of primary schoolchildren with Ukrainian as a native language based on the RUTELA working tool to determine the ability to produce written texts in German. To achieve this goal, a number of tasks were completed: samples of written texts were collected in the classes of an elementary school in the city of Vienna in Ukrainian and German, analysis and interpretation of the data were carried out. The object of the study is the early ability to write in German in elementary school children whose native language is Ukrainian. Identifying the potential of schoolchildren and using it to learn the German language is the subject of the research. Samples of written texts in Ukrainian and German are the material of this study. Elicitation was used as a method, implying actions that encourage the subjects to a productive type of speech activity. The presented study focuses on understanding the development of oral and written literacy in a multilingual environment according to the approach developed by Hans Reich, and also relies on the ELA (Early Literacy Acquisition) working tool, which determines the ability to produce written texts at an early age in Turkish and German. As a result of the analysis of the obtained data, it was possible to establish discrepancies between the realized and actual written competence, as well as to determine the child’s potential for the production of written texts at an early age. The obtained results and their interpretation make it possible to draw up a child’s language profile that describes his abilities, as well as to develop didactic and methodological approaches to support learning both German and his native language.