Abstract:

Teaching foreign languages to groups of learners who come from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds has always been a challenge for teachers due to the fact that learners are likely to decode messages in different keys depending on the socio-cultural and communicative context in which they have been educated and which is familiar to them. Often, teaching a foreign language requires the teacher to pay attention to the students' horizon of expectation, and in order for them to grasp the target language correctly, they must first create the cultural context conducive to making the right connections between linguistic and extra-linguistic reality. The challenges multiply even more when the group of students is amalgamated in terms of their cultural background and linguistic experience, and the teacher has to build own anchors in the reality they know and understand in order to integrate them linguistically and culturally into the new environment that will facilitate their language skills aquisition. The case study proposed in this article has as its target audience Ukrainian students migrating to the border countries of Romania and Moldova and needing to learn Romanian in mixed groups with students coming from geographical and cultural areas that differ significantly from own experience. The research was carried out with the aim of reaching out to Ukrainian students, who are sometimes hypersensitive and even intolerant due to traumatic experiences in the conflict zones they come from, and proposes a set of measures to avoid communication barriers and correctly anticipate risks in such situations.

Keywords:

Barriers, multilingvism, multiculturalism, target language, language skills.