Untitled

saxelmwifo enis swavlebis sakiTxebi:
problemebi da gamowvevebi
Issues of State Language Teaching;
Problems and Challenges
nority languages. It was possible, and still is, to study subjects in Latvian, in minority language or bilingually
(also within one learning subject).
From 2007 in educational establishments of ethnic minorities, the 12 th grade students have d the national
test materials in the Latvian language, while the students themselves may choose the implementation language
for the test - Latvian or Russian. Thus, just starting with school year 2007/2008, the educational programs of
ethnic minorities are fully implemented from grade 1 to 12.
Overall, the introduction of bilingual education in Latvia is a top-down example of implementation of
educational reforms; perhaps therefore it is so attractive model and example for educational reforms in other
post-soviet countries. Exclusion of minorities or only symbolic involvement in solving educational and social
integration issues resulted in protests of national minority communities, which reached its climax in 2003,
when Political party For Human Rights in Independent Latvia and the newly created Russian school defence
headquarters started to protest against the shift to secondary education «exclusively» in Latvian. As a result, in
February 2004, the Law of Education was changed stating that 60% of education in minority secondary
schools should be in Latvian, and the rest in the mother tongue.
To the question – why was educational reform for minorities necessary in Latvia, the official position of
Latvian government is the following: With the new language law, the Latvian language skills became an essential
part in both public and private sectors. It was necessary to create such education system which would
provide equal opportunities in job and education market for graduates of both Latvian and ethnic minority
schools. Bilingual education is an advantage for minority schools, because in these schools the Latvian language
is not just one subject in the schedule, but it is part of all subjects that are taught in Latvian.
Second language acquisition research implications for second language teaching
Most second language acquisition theories can be observed in the Latvian as a second language teaching
practice, in few cases it is the planned implementation of the theory in practice, but mostly these strategies
were gotten somewhere and used fragmentary by the practitioners, unknowingly and not associating it with a
certain theory or author. Especially typical in between 80s and 90s was that the ideas and methods came first,
but the “names in profession” much later. This Latvian case is most likely common to the experiences of
many parts of the former Soviet Union, but unique with respect to other parts of the world: theories and methods
were not names, that is, to be more precise they entered and spread in Latvia in an adapted and localized
(not to say plagiarised) form. For example, in the late 80s Latvian teachers were introduced to communicative
approach which was associated with the Russian linguist J. Passov. An inner joke among Latvian methodologists
later was that “Only after the fall of the “Iron Curtain” we found out that our authorities in EFL methods
in reality were just good translators”. A similar problem in the following years was with European experts
coming to Latvia in the framework of international projects (e.g. Tempus) who presented ideas, materials,
handouts without context and references.
In the remainder of this paper I will discuss some second language research areas of immediate relevance
for second language teaching in Latvia. The research areas that I will focus upon in this context are the following:
Comparing and contrasting first and second language acquisition,
Compliance of L2 as a subject teaching approach to multilingual education process,
Reconceptualising culture teaching.
Comparing and Contrasting First and Second Language Acquisition
First and second language relationship is a fundamental issue of language acquisition. It was especially
urgent to Latvian context due to state of asymmetric societal bilingualism - a common heritage of native Latvian
speakers was an excellent command of Russian, but it did not work the other way around.
Like other second language teachers, I began my career in an environment where almost all students had
one and the same first language – a big, prestige language, known also by the teachers. It caused the tempta-
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