Russian as a school subject in Germany: between politics and the market
Since the 1990s the Russian language has had an increasing presence in the public space in Germany. As a result of migration in the past decades, it has become one of the most spoken migrant languages in Germany. Russian is used predominantly in families from post-Soviet countries with a Russianspeaking population. With regard to acquisition processes, language socialization and attitudes, migrants are not a homogeneous group: the majority are resettlers of German origin, then there are Jewish émigrés and Russian-speaking refugees of other ethnic origins. On the basis of recent statistical data, Anstatt (2011) states that these groups together make about 4.5 million. There are a lot of factors supporting the vitality of Russian under migration conditions. In multilingual cities like Berlin, as well as in some smaller localities, Russian speakers have developed a widespread infrastructure (shops, bilingual kindergartens and primary schools, medical care institutions, libraries, radio channels, regional newspapers, social media, etc.). Such developments seem to be part of a worldwide trend. Russian is gaining increasing visibility and this is not linked to tourism alone. Russian as a foreign language has been studied at schools and at the tertiary level for more than half a century, although teaching took different paths in West and East Germany. The purpose of this paper is to offer an overview of the recent situation of Russian as a school subject in Germany, taking into consideration the factors that determine the status of Russian as a part of foreign language teaching system, the societal value of the Russian language as well as the ‘key actors’ involved. The history of Russian, more than other school subjects, clearly shows that in the times of societal transformations or even changes in the political systems, the educational system responds to this change. Undoubtedly, every citizen of EU must have an opportunity to learn English as the language of global communication. Therefore, it is offered as a first foreign language in all federal states of Germany, starting not later than in the third grade. This opens an opportunity to learn a second foreign language already at the lower secondary level and a third and fourth language later. While it is obligatory to learn a second language, the language can be chosen according to the school profile. Russian is primarily offered as a second, third or fourth language. A few schools with a bilingual profile offer Russian either as a first foreign language or as a language of instruction in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). Depending on the grade at the entry level and the number of class hours, the proficiency level B1 or B2 is reached in secondary schools (Table 1).
Biliterale Fähigkeiten von bilingualen Schülerinnen und Schülern im Deutschen, Türkischen und Russischen
Zusammenfassung In vorliegenden Beitrag wird der Frage nachgegangen, uber welche biliteralen Fahigkeiten deutschturkisch und deutsch-russisch bilingual aufwachsende Schulerinnen und Schuler verfugen. Schriftliche Sprachdaten auf Deutsch, Turkisch und Russisch wurden in Hinblick auf die skribale und literate Performanz der bilingualen Probanden ausgewertet. Die Analysen zeigen, dass bilinguale Schulerinnen und Schuler, die in ihrer Herkunftssprache uber einen gesteuerten Schriftspracherwerb verfugen, in ihren Leistungen nicht hinter monolingualen Mitschulerinnen und Mitschulern zuruckstehen. Weiterhin kann beobachtet werden, dass literates Strukturwissen interlingual transferiert wird und damit die Annahme der Interdependenzhypothese (Cummins 1979, 2008) bekraftigt wird. Schlagworter: Bilingualitat, Biliteralitat, literate Strukturen, Russisch, Turkisch, Herkunftssprachen ----- Biliterate skills of Bilingual Students in German, Turkish and Russian Abstract This paper focuses on the biliterate skills of German-Russian and German-Turkish bilingual students. The focus of the analysis of the written data in German, Turkish and Russian lies in the bilinguals’ scribale and literate performance. The analysis shows that bilingual students who acquired writing skills in their heritage language reach similar results as the monolingual control group. The assumption of Cummin’s interdependence (1979, 2008) hypothesis is confirmed by the observation of crosslinguistic transfer of literate knowledge. Keywords: bilingualism, biliteracy, literate structures, Russian, Turkish, heritage languages
A Rapid Method for the Extraction of Radioiodide from Urine
THE extraction of radioiodide from urine is important in radioiodide therapy, since without it the large quantities of highly radioactive urine which accumulate must be stored until the activity decays sufficiently to allow disposal.