Children's Development in a Multicutural Language Environment Lab
Nowadays people, mostly everywhere in Russia, Western Europe, United States and Canada – understand the necessity of cognitive development of individual as one of the most actual, social, psychological and educational problem of the time. N.E. Veraksa lays special emphasis on formation of a creative personality which puts in a person, a question about the world. The recognition of himself is impossible without the purposeful development of cognitive processes (attention, memory, thinking), which form the basis of human intelligence. Pre-school education should have influence on the child's intellect, and the most important is– should keep up the personality, which also requires an individual approach and individual programs. A lot of urgent problems arise out of it. The main one among them is productivity in any professional activity.
Dynamically, developing processes of intercultural language communication inside and outside Russia are associated with bilingualism: Russian-Tatar, Russian-Bashkir, Russian-Chuvash, Russian-Mari, and three- languages, when young people, their parents, the public itself realizes the need in fluent knowledge of foreign language. And that forces to include to usual educational process additional services, like bilingual or trilingual game practice. This approach is wide-spread abroad: in the United States, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland and Japan, where great attention is paid to language training of preschool children. Unfortunately, Russia doesn't follow their example. That's why well-known all over the world, Swiss and Belgian preschools with an active use of several languages, like English, French, German, Italian, serve as the example to the Russian ones. The policy to multilingualism and multiculturalism, proclaimed in Austria, Canada, is a part of national and cultural diversity.
However, the process of multicultural education and early childhood development, despite diverse practical methods of teaching languages in kindergartens of Russia and even foreign countries, is studied only partly. Psycholinguistic and lingo-didactic multicultural aspects of language development of children in kindergartens are just been promoted. In Tatarstan, (part of Russia), where mainly the Tatars and the Russians live, the number of people who consider themselves Russians, have decreased till 13 % over the last 20 years (1993-2013). There is a complete mess of strategies in teaching even native language. Moreover, they have already become the matter of state and non-state business in some educational institutions, including kindergartens. It has been forgotten, that the second language should be taught on the basis of the first language (mother language), rather than together with it. Unsynchronized and uncoordinated training often leads to weak knowledge of native language, to say nothing of foreign one. It reflects on intellect, mentality of children. As it is shown in our previous researches, the amount of people who consider themselves Tatars, increased for 27.5%. Still they speak and think in Russian. About 0.75% people, who consider themselves Russians, speak Tatar. The amount of those who wish to learn English has increased from 12.5 % to 35.6 %. Therefore, Tatar language is taught successfully, trained together with Russian and English. Uncoordinated teaching of three languages affects the knowledge of all of them. It happens when learning Russian (organized even in a form of game), children learn the names of objects, then learn English, they deal with verbs of motion, and at last, learning native language (Tatar, Chuvash, Mari), they study the adjectives. Here transposition of linguistic phenomena and interference - negative impact of one language to another - is not taken into account. The educational technology has not been developed either. As a result, there is a mixture of language meanings, so children can't speak properly at all. They are afraid of making mistakes.
The researches, we have made in several regions of Russia: Tatarstan, Chuvash and Udmurt Republics, - reveal lingo-didactic particularities in trilingual approach, as well as the difficulties, typical for children. In that number, if we mean teaching Russian, Tatar, English, there are conditions of synchronization and integration of common turns of speech, as well as typical speech errors. Among linguistic particularities of three languages, the level of word order should be mentioned, especially the category of gender. Therefore special exercises should be suggested to overcome the negative influence of one language to another. They should be based on accounting principles of transposition for integrated mapping of linguistic phenomena.
The results of laboratory research in publications:
