Ural Federal University: Mongolia’s Youth Will Learn the Russian Language More Effectively
The promotion of the Russian language in Mongolia will get an additional boost due to a new project of the Sverdlovsk Regional Fund for the Support of Youth Initiatives. Mongolian teachers of Russian as a foreign language will be able to improve their competence through new creative laboratories. The idea of creating such laboratories was supported by the Presidential Grants Fund, allocating a special grant for this purpose.
Since 2018, the Sverdlovsk Regional Fund for the Support of Youth Initiatives, with the assistance of the Presidential Grants Fund, has been implementing projects aimed at promoting the Russian language in Mongolia.
“In the project, together with our colleagues from Mongolia, we made fundamental accents on popularization of the Russian language, namely on development of an adapted communicative method based on the action-oriented approach, mastering of this method by Russian language teachers in Mongolia and implementation of this method by teachers in teaching Russian to Mongolian youth. The implementation of all stages of the project will take place online as part of creative laboratories on the platform of the project. The final event of the grant will be the youth “Russian Language Forum”,” says Nikita Kutyavin, Director of Sverdlovsk Regional Foundation for Youth Initiatives Support.
Nikita Kutyavin notes that the Russian language is in great demand in Mongolia today, and young people are interested in learning it. However, the existing method of teaching Russian in Mongolia is based on the grammar-translation method of language acquisition, which does not meet modern trends in foreign language learning. According to the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages), an internationally recognized standard of language proficiency levels, the center of the modern language teaching should be the personality of the learner, while the linguistic and cognitive method of forming a multimodal thinking of a young person should be at the head of teaching Russian as a foreign language. To overcome this contradiction, this project is supposed to implement several stages.
“The grant will use an adapted methodology based on an action-oriented approach. Then this methodology is transferred to Mongolian teachers of the Russian language within the framework of online creative laboratories, which allows us to cover the whole territory of Mongolia. In the next stage, the teachers of Russian who have been trained in the creative laboratories will design their Russian lessons based on the methodology for the specific language proficiency level of the Mongolian youth, and the students will effectively learn Russian according to the methodology. At the end, we will hold a final forum to promote the Russian language in Mongolia to young people learning Russian as a foreign language,” emphasizes Tatiana Rasskazova, head of the Department of Foreign Languages and Educational Technologies at UrFU and a member of the project team.
The main partners of the “Creative Laboratories in Russian Language” project were the Mongolian Association of Teachers of Russian Language and Literature, Rossotrudnichestvo representative office in Mongolia, the Ural Federal University, the Mongolian office of the Alumni Association of UPI, Ural State University and UrFU, as well as the Honorary Consul of Mongolia in Ekaterinburg.
The implementation of the project began on February 15.