Teaching Russian in a closely-related Slovak environment

The article discusses features of studying Russian as a foreign language in schools in Slovakia. The relevance of the research is determined by the fact that the new socio-political conditions in which Russian is studied as a second foreign language competing with other languages have brought about changes in the status, goals, motives for study, content, approaches to selecting, grouping and presenting material, the methodological concept of teaching. The aim of the work is to identify the features of teaching Russian as a second foreign language in a closely related Slovak language environment. The authors drew on the method of comparison and collation, the method of application (overlaying fragments of language systems), method of component analysis, method of word-formation analysis, methods of analysis of official statistical, sociolinguistic data. In the course of the study, the data of the State Institute for Education Statistics and Forecasts of the Slovak Republic, the peculiarities of Slovak students’ motivation for learning the Russian language were analyzed, a comparative analysis of the main lexical and grammatical phenomena of the Russian and Slovak languages was carried out. The research resulted in identifying the specifics of Russian as a Slavic language in the status of a second foreign language, the extent of its demand in school practice in Slovakia, reviewing the motives for studying it, and, on the basis of this, developing requirements for selecting, grouping, and studying lexical and grammatical material. The authors see the prospects for teaching the Russian language in Slovakia in combining the system-structural and linguoculturological approaches.