Abstract:

The article is devoted to the study of motivation and attitude of the university students to bilingual education in Russian and Tatar languages, implemented at Kazan Federal University (KFU), Republic of Tatarstan. The Republic of Tatarstan is a region of the Russian Federation where ethnic and cultural diversity have always been of particular importance due to its specific historical development. Tatars is the second largest ethnic group in Russia, so the development of bilingual education is the issue of primary importance. In 2018, the Ministry of education of the Republic of Tatarstan launched a "Bilingual Teacher" project that is aimed at training teachers for bilingual Tatar-Russian schools. A subject teacher must have bilingual competence, i.e. the ability and willingness to teach curricular subjects using two (Tatar and Russian) languages. Currently, there are 365 students studying at KFU on a bilingual basis. When implementing the project, it is important to monitor the effectiveness, adjust and improve the developed model of bilingual education. One of the factors is to monitor the attitude and motivation of bilingual students to studying on a bilingual basis using Tatar and Russian languages. For this purpose the survey was held among 153 first- and second-year bilingual pre-service teachers of KFU. The questionary and its results were developed and analyzed using the Likert scale and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient. Data analysis and the results of the survey assessed students’ motivation in terms of bilingual training programs, students’ attitudes towards using Tatar as a language of instruction and the importance of studying major-related subjects like mathematics, computer science and physics in Tatar. The results of the study showed that students are motivated to study major-related subjects in Tatar, they have positive attitude towards bilingual training programs, and they also appreciate the opportunity to study major-related subjects by means of their native (Tatar) language. Moreover, bilingual programs improve students' attitudes towards Tatar language as a language of instruction and as a language of communication in non-academic contexts. However, the study revealed a number of problems. Thus, 47% of respondents do not like using information technologies (IT) to study subject content by means of Tatar language. Apparently, this is due to the fact that the Tatar language is not widespread enough in the field of IT. Attention should be paid to development of digital educational resources in Tatar. It should be noted that 36% of respondents did not agree with the opinion that they feel comfortable when a teacher uses two languages in the classroom. This can be explained by the fact that they had no experience of bilingual education at school. In order to maintain a positive attitude and motivation among students, the support of a mentor is important and more attention should be paid to the strategy of scaffolding (language and cognitive support). Despite the fact that students are rather positive and motivated to study subjects in a bilingual program, the results of the survey show that studying a larger number of subjects in Tatar can negatively affect their attitude to the bilingual program. Further research is needed to improve motivation and attitudes, as well as understanding the academic and linguistic achievements of students in bilingual programs.

Keywords:

Bilingual education, Tatar language, Russian language, language of instruction, motivation, attitude towards bilingual learning.