Building a multilingual classroom for Chinese and Russian students: Comparative issues

Abstract

The subject of this article is made relevant by an ever growing attention given to the necessity to improve the quality of language instruction of Chinese students who come to study in the Russian Federation, which is due to the increasing demand and an ongoing strengthening of the mutual exchange and cooperation between the two countries. The personal experience collected by the authors of this article in teaching English as a second foreign language to both exclusively Russian and exclusively Chinese groups of students, allows them to draw several important conclusions regarding the specific cultural features of the students’ cognitive and learning styles, as well as culturally predisposed approaches to organizing their study process and various aspects of academic communication. The article suggests that the so-called “ethnotype” should be viewed as an important characteristic of an educational process and taken into account by the teacher when planning and implementing both classroom activities and independent study.

The situations of classroom multilingualism considered in this article are characterized by the critical feature of English being taught and acquired as a second foreign language (after Russian for Chinese students, and a variety of language families for Russians). When describing the specific nature of these processes in Chinese groups as compared to their Russian counterparts, the authors of the article insist that identical approaches should not be applied to both groups and, when applied, fail to deliver the results required. The article relates the main factors slowing down the effectiveness of educational development and proposes several ways to overcome them and to provide a more conducive learning environment, including scaffolded learning, targeted specifically at Chinese or Russian speakers based on their fundamental cultural and linguistic differences.