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Paper abstract:

The paper examines the contemporary language situation and multilingual/ trilingual education implementation at universities and secondary schools in Kazakhstan. It highlights the relevant foreign and national comparative research in this thematic area, providing the theoretical analysis of scholarly approaches, as well as practical implications.

The analysis is conducted on the present complicated language situation characterized by contradictory policy of Kazakhstani authorities and certain tensions with Russia on the grounds of the use of both languages - Russian and Kazakh. That is the constant militant criticism on the part of Russian ideologists towards the situation with the limitation of the Russian language use in the country.

In the 90s, Russian has been designated as the language of inter-ethnic communication and its status is officially on a par with the state language, Kazakh. Then, the language shift towards Kazakh was delayed for political reasons. Now, in modern Kazakhstan the language situation, as well as the dynamics of language shift are changing dramatically and at a rapid rate as the number of ethnic Kazakhs has increased which has resulted in positive reforms in favor of the Kazakh language. And this obviously has multiple effects on the education, both secondary and higher which have been implementing the governmental policy of multilingual / trilingual training since 2000-s.

The paper focuses on the conflicts between languages and possible ways to overcome them, as well as the development of the state trilingual trajectory. The accent is given to the conceptualization of multilingual education i.e. simultaneous teaching in three languages - Kazakh, Russian and English in the context of the existing language policy. Different arguments, historical comments and analysis from language and education studies are used in the paper to illustrate the research objectives.