Teaching Russian in a Multilingual Educational Context

Abstract

In this article the author refers to her own extensive experience of teaching Russian as a foreign language in an academic multilingual environment. When teaching Russian in multilingual academic contexts, especially with beginners, the problem inevitably arises of finding correlations between the students’ established language structures and the new imparted knowledge. In conditions where the entire educational process at university takes place in three official languages, Russian is offered as an optional course. The teacher is then faced with a series of tasks involving the organization of work within a diverse group of students with different language and cultural backgrounds, as well as the need to choose a metalanguage. The methods of observation and analysis allow conclusions to be drawn about the significant influence exerted by various linguistic characteristics of the second language, including its phonetical, lexical, and grammatical aspects, on the process of learning Russian as a foreign language. The process of teaching Russian not as a “second” language but rather within a “third” language paradigm in a multilingual context inevitably implies taking into account the previous experience of students, which serves as both a catalyst and a delaying mechanism. In the article the author describes how teaching Russian as a foreign language in a bilingual German and Italian academic context stimulates the students’ mechanisms of reflection and awareness of the peculiarities of their own languages. This includes the opportunity offered to students to distance themselves from their native language and, through the prism of the second language with which they are already familiar, examine their own native language as well as the new language being studied. The experience of teaching in a multilingual environment allows conclusions to be drawn about the effectiveness of the principles of intercultural communication, including when the students’ native languages are different. As a rule, research carried out on such principles has shown their effectiveness within groups of speakers of close languages.