Deputy Director of Russian Language Institute (RLI) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the prominent philologist Leonid Krysin, explained why Russia proved unready to bolster the prestige of the Russian language among the migrants, despite their growing need to speak fluent Russian, in his interview for the Russkiy Mir portal.
– Mr. Leonid, according to various estimates, from 10 to 18 million migrants presently resides in Russia. Increasingly often they come with their families. The result is first-graders lacking even elementary command of Russian. According to experts, the main problem is not even the great number of arriving kids who do not speak Russian, but rather their inability to engage in the education process, for there are no properly trained teachers or teaching methodologies. Why? Are we not aware of the problem’s scope?
– This is indeed a new phenomenon, especially in grade school education. Mixed classes can now be found not only in Moscow and other megalopolises, but in most Russian regions as well. Some of the students are Russian kids; another part is Russian citizens for whom Russian is not a mother tongue; and finally the third most topical and swelling part is children who came from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kirgizia, or even from Africa and Afghanistan. All of them have a different command of Russian. Some are more or less fluent in Russian; others coming to grade 6 or 7 are at a “primer” level, whereas kids from the third group speak almost no Russian at all. Yet a universal curriculum is thrust upon all of them. Not that philologists and methodologists were unaware of this challenge; yet no effective solution has so far been found. Thus academics of St. Petersburg Herzen Pedagogical University develop methods of teaching Russian in a mixed language environment, doing a difficult work that was to be done yesterday. For now a lot hangs upon the professionalism and experience of an individual teacher. If I were in the shoes of the Russian language teacher in a modern school, I’d be at a loss for methods of teaching such a diverse audience. Perhaps for now tutorship is indispensable.
– What is undertaken at the government and academic level for these children to get affordable education in the Russian language they can speak?
– The only viable measure is certification – an exam in the Russian language to be passed by a foreigner before he or she settles in this country. For now we have only paid language courses, which the children of migrant workers often cannot afford.
– What about the world experience?
– This problem is new to this country, unlike USA or EU states. Back in the seventies I collaborated with a German sociolinguist who was studying the integration of Turks into the German society, including the language integration. Not just families but entire Turkish clans came there; they lived in their isolate ethnic circle, had a poor command of German and were hostile towards the German-speaking medium; that spawned numerous social problems. More than forty years ago Germans launched language courses for those who wanted to stay in that country. The system of teaching German to immigrants was and still is effective and successful. I am less familiar with the situation in the US where the ethnic origin of immigrants is more diverse, so they have to take into consideration the specifics of Latin immigrants, the Chinese, immigrants from Africa and other ethnic groups. They introduced the “Basic English” concept there, that is, a simpler version of English, which makes it easier for immigrants to master spoken English which is often more than enough for them. Incidentally, a similar situation has developed in France and Canada. It is important to realize the consequences of such a simplified approach: primitive and inadequate command of the language sets up barriers for a vertical social process. There is a concept of “vertical mobility” in sociology, that is, a person climbing up the social ladder. Evidently, one of the conditions for this progress is a perfect command of the literary language serving the needs of the local community.
– If immigrants are not taught Russian en masse, is it possible that we end up introducing a similar version of Basic Russian for them?
– We already have the “Basic Russian” concept. Basic should mean “literate”, rather than the language of classical literature. The term “literary language” was established at the turn of the XIX century and this was the language of belles-lettres at its height. Now this is an altogether different language and the term means a standard language serving the cultured social strata. The problem is that in the Russian cultural tradition such terms as “basic” or “standard” have negative connotations of “primitive” and “clich
