Perm State University will provide a unique educational program for teachers. The BA Course in Pedagogical education is going to include two profiles at once: Russian as a Foreign Language (RFL) and Chinese Language. This is a rare combination of profiles for Russian universities. Since 2021, the program will take five years – the measure believed to improve the quality of the program.
On behalf Perm State University, Elena Erofeeva, Head of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, and Daria Pavlova, Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Philology, presented the educational program at the International Educational Salon last December.
“Our experience of training teachers of Russian as a foreign language shows that they are more successful when they speak a supplementary foreign language. Since our faculty has strong and long-term ties with Chinese universities, we decided such language would be Chinese,”
says Elena Erofeeva
The knowledge of the Chinese language provides program graduates a competitive advantage in the modern labor market. Notably, the demand for Russian language teachers among Chinese people is quite high both in China and Russia.
“In 2021, we decided to open an admission for this program in the form of a two-profile five-year bachelor’s degree, finding it necessary for better mastery of the Chinese language. The new curriculum includes two profiles: “Russian as a Foreign Language” and “Chinese Language”,” comments the Faculty of Philology, PSU.
The first profile includes such disciplines as Basic Linguistics, the Methods of RFL Teaching, the Study of Russian Oral Speech, Basic Psycholinguistics, Ontolinguistics, and others. The program does not propose studying the structure of the Russian language separately, as a Modern Russian language course; rather it is done within such disciplines as General Phonetics, General Semantics, and General Grammar.
The second profile is comprised of the Chinese Language, the Workshop on Translation from Chinese, the Workshop on the Culture of Speech Communication, and Oriental Literature and Culture. In addition, the educational program provides students with teaching practice, both in teaching Russian as a Foreign Language Course (popular among junior migrants), and teaching Chinese language.
Thanks to the existing agreements between Perm State University and Chinese universities, PSU students will enjoy the opportunity of exchange courses in China (1 to 6 months), upon a favorable epidemiological situation.
Perm State University has formed a long tradition of training teachers of Russian as a foreign language. Initially, the specialists had been prepared on individual basis, since 1990s at the PSU Faculty of Philology. Russian as a Foreign Language course had been certified since 2005 as a part of the 5-years specialty program in Philology. In 2018, the training resumed to a 4-years Teacher Education bachelor course. The first graduates of a new 5-year course in Russian as a Foreign Language with knowledge of Chinese language will get their certificates in 2022.
The International Educational Salon was held on 7-9 December within the “Russia in Scientific and Cultural Dialogue” Project framework, with a support by the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation.
