Intercomprehension between Slavic languages - A case study on Serbian and Russian

Abstract

This thesis explores the concept of Intercomprehension in language teaching and learning, and the application of its methods in order to facilitate understanding and communication between languages that belong to the Slavic language family. The first part of this thesis focuses on explaining the concept of Intercomprehension and its implications in language teaching and learning, as well as in the promotion of multilingualism within the European Union. The second part consists of a brief history of Slavic languages, their evolution, and similarities. The third part is a presentation of case-study research conducted on a group of speakers of Russian as L1 and L2. The participants were given a text in Serbian, a language from the same language family that Russian belongs to, which they had never studied before. The hypothesis was that the speakers of one Slavic language are able to understand basic information provided by a short text written in another Slavic language. This would be possible by using Intercomprehension strategies (for example, noticing similarities existing between these languages at the level of language systems, such as the structural, lexical, grammatical, and cultural similarities).