MULTILINGUAL DEVELOPMENT OF JUNIOR SCHOOLCHILDREN THROUGH A POLYLINGUAL MARATHON «КЫЛГЕРӞЕТ» (BASED ON UDMURT, RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH LANGUAGES)

The article describes an educational project as a form of extracurricular activity that contributes to the development of creative and cognitive abilities of primary schoolchildren. The project is being realised on the initiative and on the basis of the Udmurt Republic State National Gymnasium named after Kuzebai Gerd (Izhevsk), with the participation of other educational institutions of the Udmurt Republic. The staff of the gymnasium creates favourable conditions for the development of a multilingual personality. The curricula include native (Udmurt, Russian) and foreign (English, German) languages. The Udmurt language is studied as a native language and as a second language after Russian. The relevance of this work lies in the fact that teaching native and foreign languages in a bilingual and multilingual audience is one of the priorities of modern linguodidactics aimed at creating national and cultural conditions in the educational process. The implementation of a long-term project (2014–2023) called “Multilingual marathon “KylGerdzet” (“Language node”) is presented as an illustrative materal. The aim is to generalise the experience of creating and promoting a multilingual marathon among primary schoolchildren of the Udmurt Republic. This marathon is an intelligent gaming technology using three languages: Udmurt, Russian and English. The novelty of the research lies in the presentation of the results of an innovative project. A descriptive research method was employed. The number of participants in the marathon was 551, 30 students of the Kuzebai Gerd Gymnasium took part in the first year (5,1%), in 2023 their number increased to 143 people (26% of the total). The event was attended by children from different educational institutions of the republic. Over the years of the intellectual marathon, the technology for the implementation of the event has been developed; creative tasks have been done and tested to contribute to the intellectual development of children.They are based on language comparison and aimed at the formation and development of a multilingual personality in early language education.