Modern Educational Domain: Bilingualism and Multilingualism in Teaching Foreign Languages

Abstract

Russian academic society has traditionally been considered linguistically and culturally homogeneous. However, during the last two decades there was observed a notable shift towards heterogeneous zooming in teaching field due to specific social, demographic and political changes. The topicality of the research is stipulated by linguistic and cultural fusion due to increasing number of people speaking two or more languages globally. The research goal is to prove that a teacher being natural bilingual and multilingual can be far more effective and impactful in the educational process than an artificial bilingual and multilingual one. To envision possible prospects and benefits of natural bilingual and multilingual teachers within modern educational domain a special study was conducted. The research involved two pools of the participants: the students (220 students in general) and the teaching staff (26 teachers) at Plekhanov Russian University of Economics. After each experiment session all participants were encouraged to fill in Self-Reported Questionnaire (SRQ) and to pass Free association test (FAT). Both of the monitoring instruments are implemented to verify each other to reveal and assess students' attitude to the teachers' input into "enrichment" of the educational process and consecutive boost in students' linguistic and metalinguistic abilities. The authors put forward hypotheses suggesting there is a link between students' assertiveness to be more involved in foreign languages learning process with natural bilingual and multilingual teachers and such interaction within cultural linguistic framework may be appealing to all students. The results obtained through SRQ and FAT demonstrated the impressive rise of students' engagement into the educational process and significant boost in motivation after the second session of the experiment. The aforesaid witnesses that such vector shift in the learning process is seen in its overall introduction into the academic setting in order to upgrade modern educational environment and specifically in teaching foreign languages.

Bilingualism and Multilingualism in International Teaching

“…European education, such as the trilingual education in Luxembourg and the "immersion" education in Canada, where children are initially educated in their mother/first/home language and then receive multilingual education, allows students to become proficient in both the language and the mother tongue. (Rezepova, Torosyan, Stepanenko, & Guseynov, 2018) analyze the reasons for this from a linguistic perspective by looking at the differences in language education between Europe and Singapore. In European schools and the Luxembourg trilingual education system, children are initially educated in their mother tongue/home language/first language.…”