Christoph Gabriel & Jonas Grünke | Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

This contribution focuses on heritage bilingualism and concomitant language dominance patterns by analyzing six German-Turkish high school students, who have grown up in Northern Germany (ages 15–17). We calculated dominance scores for the participants based on the interplay of language use and self-assessed proficiency as indicated in a sociolinguistic questionnaire, which categorized them as balanced bilinguals. However, proficiency measures in both languages revealed that all but one participants score higher in German than in Turkish concerning reading comprehension (LGVT, Schneider et al. 2017) and writing skills (Klinger et al. 2019). This finding might be explained by the fact that they generally use German in public and educational contexts, while Turkish is restricted to the familial domain, as a closer look at the questionnaires shows.

Furthermore, to determine how strongly the Turkish spoken by the bilinguals is affected by CLI from the environmental language German at the prosodic level, we compared their productions to control data recorded from (a) Turkish monolinguals and (b) monolingual German learners of Turkish. Measurements of rhythmic and intonational properties showed that the bilinguals’ prosody does not substantially deviate from the monolinguals’.

Finally, as Turkish largely patterns with French regarding rhythm and intonation and thus might constitute a source of positive transfer, the HL speakers’ prosody was also assessed in their foreign language French. However, they did not perform better than a control group of monolingual German learners. We interpret this finding as showing that in a clearly German-dominated domain such as the educational system the degree of activation of the HL Turkish is low and French seems to be mainly acquired through the majority language. To make HL speakers benefit from their first language at school, both activation and awareness of its structural properties should be fostered in the multilingual classroom.

References

Klinger, T., Usanova, I., & Gogolin, I. 2019. Entwicklung rezeptiver und produktiver schriftsprachlicher Fähigkeiten im Deutschen. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaften 22, 75–103.

Schneider, W., Schlagmüller, M., & Ennemoser, M. 2017. LGVT 5-12+. Manual. Göttingen: Hogrefe.

Marina Aksenova | Minin University (Nizhny Novgorod State Pedagogical University), Russia

Export of Russian education abroad resulted in multinational classes at universities when students from different countries studied together in one environment. The paper analyses different ways of studying and acquiring Russian as a foreign language that can be observed among students with different learning experience.

Foreign students in Russian universities represent mostly two major groups: students from former Soviet republics and students from more distant countries. Students from such countries as Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and other neighboring countries may have had the experience of learning Russian at school. With the dominant position and prevailing of the national language, the role of Russian has become less significant, though Russian classes are quite regular and usually begin at primary school. At the same time the students do not tend to use Russian in everyday life and have certain difficulties discussing the academic subjects due to the language barrier and the habit of relying on the national language. 

Students, whose first experience of learning Russian begins with the arrival to Russia, surprisingly have certain benefits: the common mistakes have not yet formed and become rigid in their speech, the completely different language environment (sometimes with no one sharing the same national language) serves as a factor that encourages students to speak Russian and practice it often. The novelty of the language (and the language environment) in their experience also helps to support interest to the Russian language. There is also a tendency of creative word-formation of unique lexical units constructed according to all norms of Russian..

The paper examines various factors that may influence acquisition of Russian as a foreign language by students of different language learning background.

References:

Arefyev  A.L. Russian at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries.

Passov, E.I. Communicative Method of Teaching Foreign Language Speaking. Moscow, Prosveschenie.

V.B. Kurilenko, M.A. Makarova, O.M. Scherbakova, E. Yu. Kulikova. Linguistic and cultural surrounding of international university as means of bilingual students communicative development.