The effect of the Russian language immersion on academic achievement of students whose mother tongue is Azerbaijani.

The sociolinguistic context in Azerbaijan today is one in which massive second language learning is taking place. More than a hundred thousand students in Azerbaijan study in Russian immersion schools. The motivation for this research originates from the desire to understand if those students benefit from Russian language education and how challenging it is for Azerbaijani speaking students to learn academic content in the second language. With this study, we attempt to compare the academic achievement of Azerbaijani speaking and Russian speaking students immersed in the Russian language. The aim of surveying students of Russian-medium instruction was to understand if there was an achievement gap between students whose home language was Russian and those whose home language was Azerbaijani. A self-administered survey was conducted among the Russian-taught 7th and 10th grade students across schools in Baku. The results are presented in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]