THE IMPACT OF BILINGUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT ON THE IDENTITY OF RUSSIAN-SPEAKING YOUNG PEOPLE IN LATVIA

Relevance of the work dues to the fact that bilingual education in today’s multicultural world is an effective teaching model. It allows, along with the development of educational content to solve problems, associated with the formation of abilities of intercultural communication. The purpose of the research is to analyze the situation in Latvia, where bilingual approach in national minorities’ schools has been extensively implemented in recent decades. In all countries, except for Russia, the Russian language exists within another language (languages) environment. In a situation of contact between two cultural and language systems, one of which is dominating socially, Russian-speaking bilingual acts as a representative of the non-dominant system. Under the conditions of native language’s ethnic area remoteness, while in the non-dominant part of the language community, the younger generation of Russian bilinguals partly lose language norms, competence, and a sense of cultural and language identity.