Psychological Principles of Cross-Language Interference in Language Education

The aim of this study is to investigate the advantages given by the bilingual approach (as opposed to the unilingual one) to language teaching and, on the student’s part, language acquisition.
The methods applied by the authors were descriptive, typological, oppositional and introspective; these were used for the analysis of typical communicational situations habitual in classroom teaching practices.
The article reveals a defi nite inherent link between the student’s background knowledge of his mother tongue and his ability to learn a new language. This link provides ground for stable and versatile cross-language interferences.
The authors conclude about a necessity to pay closer attention to the said cross-language interferences since this factor defi nes the progress and eff ectiveness of foreign language acquisition. A teacher’s task is to create appropriate psychological conditions permitting the student to let some elements of the mother tongue to the realm of his general linguistic consciousness.