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Abstract

The Kyrgyz language got a legal status of state language in 1989, and Russian language acquired a status of ‘official language’ in 2000. Since then the Government of the KR has adopted legal documents to secure the status of both languages (Baisalov, 2019). However, the issue of using the Kyrgyz language on the level of the state language is not solved yet.

The Ministry of Education required a mandatory exam in state language as part of the National Test for graduates of high school starting 2024 (Order # 191/1 of the Ministry of Education and Science of the KR, February 7, 2024). According to this order, the National Test certificates will not be issued to applicants without passing the state language test, although the results will not affect the competition for admission to universities. The obligation to take tests is important, but it is not the main motivation for learning the Kyrgyz language. This test can help identify the Kyrgyz language proficiency level of graduates to take further actions to improve the quality of teaching and learning of the Kyrgyz language. But no one can guarantee whether or not the mandatory test will help people speak Kyrgyz.

As a participant observer with long-term teaching experiences of the Kyrgyz language, the author identifies several reasons that delay the achievement of the goals. Until now, Russian speakers did not feel the need to learn the Kyrgyz language, because there is no Kyrgyz language comfortable environment where people could feel and recognize Kyrgyz language through communication, mass media, education, art and research. In addition, the Kyrgyz language is mainly taught using old Soviet methodology without interactive and communicative methods. Finally, schools lack high-quality Kyrgyz language textbooks.

The intention of the Ministry of Education and Sciences is good, and it is possible to implement the new regulations with a holistic approach to teaching and learning of the Kyrgyz language.

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In this talk we take an interdisciplinary perspective to consider the relationship between language and the movement or reimagining of political borders. In sociolinguistics, there has been considerable interest in mobility and contact among speakers and languages, including work on language and migration (e.g. Canagarajah 2017; Horner and Dailey-O’Cain 2019), language contact (Lim and Ansaldo 2016) and language in ‘border zones’ (Carvalho 2014; Watt and Llamas 2014). Yet we argue that the border has often been taken for granted in sociolinguistics as a pre-existing object. On the other hand, in political geography and geopolitics, there is already a robust theorization of borders as “socio-cultural and discursive processes and practices” (Brambilla 2015: 15). Yet scholars in these fields rarely engage with detailed empirical linguistic and discourse data on border production, which sociolinguistics is well-positioned to do. We combine these approaches to consider how borders are discursively produced and how borders impact the social construction of language use. We frame our discussion with reference to a case study where borders are/have been shifted and reimagined, namely the case of Dungans in Kazakhstan. Dungans have experienced multiple instances of shifting borders, and we examine interview data to trace how they draw on different historical narratives which emphasize their presence in the Russian empire and the Soviet Union to construct themselves as legitimate participants in modern Kazakhstan. We seek to illustrate how a theorization of borders informed by work in political geography can engage with the empirical richness offered by sociolinguistics to provide an important perspective on how individuals and social groups make sense of border changes and corresponding shifts in socio-political reality.

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Professional preparation is a crucial component of Language education as it helps in the development of the personal abilities of each member of society. The concept of professional language has emerged due to the demand for new trends and the revolution in linguistics. Classes aim is to create self-esteem, self-respect, and self-confidence among students by providing them with necessary communication skills, and logical sequence of a professional speech. Teaching professional language has been a topic of discussion in both linguistic and methodological terms with several questions arising in scientific literature. These include the purpose of professional language preparation; methodological approaches to teaching it; how to use the theory of content-based teaching to teach it; how to clarify the needs of students, and what level should the professional Kazakh language be taught. The current debate in language education is not limited to knowledge and skills acquisition but also involves a practical connection between education and life. In this paper, we hope to summarize the modern experience of foreign, Russian, and Kazakh scientists and analyze these problems in detail. Furthermore, we will analyze the main issues related to the development of curricula for teaching the Business Kazakh language. Teaching the Business Kazakh language involves taking into account the desires and requirements of the language learners because the language for business skills includes awareness of transitive coacher, relevant motivations, and explicit activities. This means that identifying the learner’s needs is important in creating successful programs. As a result, the analysis of needs is a significant step in Brown’s six core stages and a link between linguistic content and subject matter.