Abstract:

This paper aims to identify some of the challenges faced by RFL (Romanian language as a foreign language) teachers when interacting with Russian speaking students. The recent events at Romania’s border with Ukraine resulted in an effluence of Ukrainian students eager to study in our country. As in the case of most foreign students, they too are required to attend the classes of the Preparatory year of Romanian language, an intensive year of Romanian language targeted towards helping the student reach the B1 level of language competence. Given the fact that most of these Ukrainian students come from an area historically known as Bessarabia (historically, a territory lost by Romania and occupied by Russians), they are usually assessed and placed in groups of beginners, intermediate or advanced. The intermediate and advanced students come from families that speak the Romanian language, however they speak a ‘frozen’ language, i.e., an outdated version of the Romanian language, characterized by regionalisms and archaic words. Their pronunciation is also very close to the Moldavian dialect. To these characteristics add up the strong influence of the Russian and Ukrainian language and the lack of schooling in the Romanian language (most of them have only learned and interacted with the spoken language within their family boundaries) and the constant phenomenon of crosslinguistic transfer and code-switching specific to multicultural communities. Therefore, considering the historical, ethnographical, cultural and linguistic background of this particular group of students, the present paper will focus on the analysis of a large corpus of both written and spoken texts that will enable the identification of code-switching and crosslinguistic transfer patterns, with an emphasis on the positive and negative transfer.

Keywords:

second language, multilingualism, crosslinguistic transfer, code-switching.