The Linguistic Situation of International Students in Kazakhstan: Translingualism and Code-Switching

Abstract

This article examines the various linguistic, social, and translingual aspects that international students currently studying in our country face when mastering the state language. International students of Turkmen descent studying at higher education institutions in our country study Kazakh as the state language in their general education subjects according to the standard. Students studying based on the European standard (5 ECTS) encounter translingual phenomena and code-switching when mastering the language. They also encounter these linguistic phenomena when learning the language. Studying this phenomenon is a task for linguists. In this study of the linguistic situation of international students in Kazakhstan, a comprehensive analysis method, as well as interviewing, observation, and ethnographic observation, were used to qualitatively analyze the difficulties in language learning and the cognitive benefits of translingualism. The study's results revealed that the first obstacle faced by Turkic-speaking foreign language students in the language acquisition process is the use of Russian as a transcommunicative tool. It was observed that, when mastering linguistic paradigms, they used Russian syntactic structures as a direct translation. This demonstrates that translingualism is a way to establish communication by using elements of the target language through their existing language. It was also found that translinguistic features are used to convey ideas through phonetics, vocabulary, morphology, and syntactic structures based on pronunciation, listening, reading, and writing tasks through texts. Translinguistic features are reflected in code-switching. Code-switching was confirmed by examples of phonetic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic interference. The linguistic situation of Turkmen foreign students can be described as a translinguistic phenomenon, and their changes in speech can serve as examples reflecting the linguistic situation in Kazakhstan.

Key words: language situation, translingualism, language code, code switching, Turkic-speaking students.