MOSCOW, Dec 5 Latvia to ban the study of the Russian language in schools, but the number of those choosing it as a second foreign language is declining, over the past year the number of Lithuanian schoolchildren studying Russian has decreased by 8.6%, said Dainoras Lukas, adviser to the Minister of Education, Science and Sports of Lithuania.
«There is no such decision that there will be no Russian language in schools at all. As I already mentioned, the Russian language itself is gradually disappearing in schools. We hope and discuss that from the beginning of the next academic year the number of sixth graders who choose Russian will will decrease by 15-20%,» Lukas said on Lithuanian Radio.
He recalled that in Lithuania, students choose a second foreign language in the sixth grade and study it for at least five years. Earlier, the ministry published statistics, according to which almost 15,000 sixth-graders chose Russian as their second foreign language, 4,765 students chose German, and just over 1,800 French.
“Even last year, 77% of all schoolchildren in the country studied Russian as a second foreign language. Over the course of seven years, this number decreased by 4%, that is, from 81%. And last year alone, the number of sixth-graders who chose Russian decreased by 8.6%. That is, this year 68% of sixth-graders have chosen to learn Russian, which is almost 9% less than they have been taught so far,» Lukas said.
According to him, next year the ministry will allocate incentive scholarships only to those students of pedagogical departments who choose German or French, and that they will try to retrain Russian language teachers as teachers of other subjects that are lacking in schools.
«The popularity of Russian language in our country is naturally decreasing. The number of teachers of the Russian language is gradually decreasing. Teachers of the Russian language are older than teachers in all other subjects. Now we have 800 teachers of the Russian language, 299 teachers of German and 120 teachers of French who work in schools. It should be noted that teachers of the Russian language are the least trained — this year only nine students enrolled to study as teachers in the Russian language,» Lukas said.
Earlier, the Saeima of Latvia adopted a bill on the transition of all education to the Latvian language within three years , Russian can only be studied as a «minority language». About 1.8 million people live in Latvia. Of these, about 40% are Russian-speaking. Latvia has one state language — Latvian. The Russian language has the status of a foreign language.