Cross-Cultural Analysis of Bilingualism in Preparinginternational Students for Training Professionally Oriented Disciplines

Abstract

The practice of using two languages in teaching students, for whom at least one of them is not native, is a constant subject of teachers’ scientific discussions. The specificity of productive bilingualism in the educational environment, the need to understand, reproduce and produce foreign-language professionally oriented texts in two languages requires detailed consideration. The ratio of the two languages is another problem analysed by the authors. How the share of each language depends on the stage of training and the socio-cultural environment is the subject of research in this work. The authors consider cross-cultural differences in the initial educational training of students of the Preparatory faculty of the Financial University under the government of the Russian Federation and ways to improve their adaptation to the specificity of training in a Russian university. Particular attention is paid to the issues of language propaedeutics for mastering specialised terminology, in particular, the use of mathematical apparatus. As the authors imply, the functional and speech-dominant of students’ training is the Russian language for specific purposes, which becomes the language of a foreign student’s “survival” in the Financial University, providing him with the opportunity to study special subjects, passing tests and exams. If teaching is conducted in English, then in case of lexical difficulties, teachers of academic disciplines use Russian as a partner language, and such bilingual approach is justified, as it increases the efficiency of mastering disciplines. The article discusses the features of teaching international students mathematics through English as the language of international communication and Russian as the language of the host country. The authors analyse the program for teaching “Mathematics”, taking into account the fact that students have a different initial level of knowledge in mathematics and sometimes do not speak English or the language of the host country. The article presents a statistical analysis