On October 6, the 5th ROPRYAL Congress, “Dynamics of Linguistic and Cultural Processes in Contemporary Russia,” was held in Kazan.
The congress brought together more than 600 participants, including school and university teachers, methodologists, researchers, cultural studies experts, representatives of federal and regional authorities, and educational publishers. The event featured a high level of academic discussion focused on developing modern strategy, ideology, and approaches to language learning. Key topics included raising philological literacy and the population’s reading and speech culture, improving curricula and educational standards, and strengthening systems of linguistic and sociocultural integration.
Anna-Maria Yuryevna Nikolaeva, Director of English Nursery and Primary School, delivered a presentation on how teaching second-language vocabulary through immersion affects children’s cognitive development. According to contemporary researchers, bilingual programmes help develop awareness of linguistic operations and metalinguistic awareness, cognitive flexibility, a creative approach to working with concepts, the ability to work with semantically diverse information at different levels, communicative intuition, and higher cognitive functions.
The observations conducted suggest that children who actively use both languages demonstrate top-of-the-norm cognitive development in spatial thinking, attention, perception, memory, thinking, and constructive praxis. Their performance in imagery-based thinking exceeds the norm and indicates advanced development.