THE USE OF THE EUROCOMGERM METHOD “DIE SIEBEN SIEBE” IN MODERN UKRAINIAN SCHOOL

Abstract

The article focuses on the EuroComGerm research project, which is based on the principles of the multilingualism didactics. The article argues the approach of enhancing the language knowledge by applying the targeted foreign language onto the knowledge of previously acquired languages. The EuroComGerm is a concept that is based on parallel learning of related languages. H. G. Klein, one of the authors, believes that the future of language learning is in the receptive knowledge of language and in the development of listening and reading comprehension. In 1999 the project received an award as “European language label for the best innovative language projects” in Vienna. The EuroComGerm project was published in 2007 as a handbook, created by B. Huffayzen and N. Marx. The researchers identified “The Seven Sieves” as the linguistic indicators which served to analyze related languages in identifying their common and distinctive features. The article deals separately with each of the “Sieves”, and attempts to apply the technique on the example of a passage in a foreign, previously not acquired language using the knowledge of the German language. The present study confirmed the findings that the technique is effective and allows to understand the content of the text in an unknown language based on a sufficient level of language proficiency of a different language of the same language family (in our case, German language). This technique provides opportunities for learning more than three related languages: Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, and Dutch.