Journal archive

Abstract: The paper describes the experience of holding a multilingual Olympiad among junior schoolchildren in order to promote the idea of multilingualism in education. It gives a brief outline of the history of Lingua – a language school for young learners at Udmurt State University – which provides a base for the development of early language education technologies that aim at the shoulder-to-shoulder study of languages and cultures and the development of a multilingual individual. A special role is assigned to the Russian language as the basis for language education in Russia. The Olympiad was initiated by international laboratories with distributed participation of Russian and foreign universities, which in 2017 presented the projects “Ecology of the world is ecology of languages and cultures” and “The Russian language in the world: bilingualism and polyilingualism”. The Olympiad was run by the international laboratory of Udmurt State University. The paper describes the stages of the Olympiad: preparation, organization, research, and interpretation of results. As one of the results, the following has been established. There is a correlation between the level of knowledge of a foreign language by junior schoolchildren and the level of their knowledge of Russian: the schoolchildren who had high scores in the foreign language Olympiad also had high scores in Russian. The paper points out that the multilingual Olympiad is an innovative product of networking and has good prospects of acquiring the international status. Several years of university networking at the level of international laboratories with distributed participation have shown the effectiveness of this initiative, which is enhanced by taking into consideration of the local and existing unique features of each partner. These include organizational, research, project, educational, methodological, publishing and volunteer work in which the region situated between the Volga and the Urals (Tatarstan, Udmurtia, Bashkortostan) is involved at the Russian level. Besides, the experience of cooperation with Kazakhstan and Germany was extremely useful.