UKRAINIAN AS A HERITAGE LANGUAGE: SPEAKERS AND LEARNERS

Abstract

The concept of ‘heritage language’ has become part of Ukrainian language education discourse in recent years in response to American and European traditions. The purpose of the article is to explore the concept of the learner of Ukrainian as a heritage language as one of the central concepts in the didactics of Ukrainian as a heritage language. With regard to the previous experience, we reiterated that Ukrainian as a heritage language is the Ukrainian language that is studied in various institutions abroad and spoken in certain areas outside Ukraine among people of Ukrainian descent. Traditionally, students who are native speakers of Ukrainian / speakers of the Ukrainian language as a heritage language have developed their oral language skills through their home environment or in part through community involvement. In the article, we also distinguished a student of the Ukrainian language as a foreign language from a student of Ukrainian as a heritage language. In referring to the Ukrainian language as a foreign language, the focus is on learning and mastering the language, which includes learning and understanding the rules of the language and observing the gradual results. The term “acquisition” means the unconscious process of mastering rules, resulting from influence (action) to comprehensible use (putting into action). It has also been determined that the learning process is influenced by motivation, the level of bilingualism (multilingualism) and identity. These factors vary among different people (mostly among children), but they are a common factor of influence on all people who study Ukrainian as a heritage language (in comparison, for example, with Ukrainian as a foreign language). It has been observed that receptive skills (in particular, listening) prevail over productive ones (in particular, writing) in a learner of Ukrainian as a heritage language. Communicative and sociocultural competences are developed to the greatest extent. Linguistic competence is formed in a fragmented way and differently for each individual. In this paper, it is argued that a learner of Ukrainian as a heritage language should form his/her competences in the modern Ukrainian literary language, and accordingly, the didactical materials should contain the modern standardized Ukrainian language (although not without non-literary variants, or, for example, incorporating them into exercises). Key words: Ukrainian as a heritage language, learner, speker, acquisition, learning.