Scholarly record

THE INFLUENCE OF THE NATIVE LANGUAGE ON THE STUDY OF THE GERMAN LANGUAGE AMONG BILINGUAL STUDENTS

A. Yakovleva, S. Sergucheva, A. Efimova

Abstract

Many foreign and Russian research papers have been devoted to the successful mastering of foreign languages by bilingual students. Although this problem is sufficiently studied in many languages, the problem of teaching bilinguals is still relevant nowadays and requires a further in-depth study. It is interesting to consider this issue in the context of comparing the phonological systems of two unrelated languages: German and Yakut. The article deals with the problems of teaching the German language to bilingual students in the conditions of interaction using three languages. In Yakutia, a national republic within Russia, a considerable number of university students is bilingual. The Yakut language is a language from the group of northeastern Turkic languages and this language is spoken by most of people in the Sakha Republic. Comparing this problem, one can find not only differences, but similar features of both languages: similar sounds of the native language certainly help in learning a foreign language. Thus, in this article the influence of the native language in pronunciation is analyzed. This study considers the most typical phenomena in mastering the modern German language by Yakut bilingual students. In this study we used the methods of comparison, observation and experimental procedure. We hypothesize that the comparative study of the three languages' systems can help to overcome the problem of interference in mastering the foreign language by bilingual students. We also suppose that the comparative analysis in this case of sound systems of Yakut, German and Russian will help not only to understand the causes of the problem that students face but also to prevent the difficulties using features of their native language.

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