Theory of Intercultural Communication

The discipline is read for first-year students of a master course (1st semester). The total working intensiveness amounts to 72 academic hours including class work (lectures) - 36 hours, self-instruction work – 36 hours.  ECTS equals 2. While mastering the given discipline students are to take a credit.

The main goal of the discipline is to improve the level of students’ professional qualification acquired at the previous stage of learning; provide students with skills necessary to carry out self-sufficient scientific research; improve skills of critical perception and evaluation of information sources; promote skills necessary to logically form, explain and defend their own scientific point of view on a given problem and creating or finding means of solving it.

While mastering this course students are to learn essential terms of the course and be able to achieve traits that make for competent intercultural communicators include flexibility and the ability to tolerate high levels of uncertainty, reflection or mindfulness, open-mindedness, sensitivity, adaptability, and the ability to engage in divergent and systems-level thinking. Further goals are to promote the students’ perception of the place and role of the given course in their professional training, especially in forming essential skills of their profession; to form the students’ view of the basic stages of the foundation and development of science.

The most important issues students are to cover while studying the given discipline are: General Questions of History of Science, the History and Development of  Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences, Types of Scientific Research and Development and their Specifics, Structure and Basic Forms of Scientific Knowledge, General Questions of Methodology; Method, the Classification of Methods of Scientific Research; Nature, Structure and Stages of Carrying out Scientific Research; History and Methodology of Linguistics, Specifics of Linguistics as a Science, Specific Features of Linguistic Research.

Technical translation

The discipline is read for first-year students of a master course (2nd semester). The total working intensiveness amounts to 108 academic hours including class work (seminars) - 30 hours, self-instruction work – 42 hours, revision before an exam – 36 hours).  ECTS equals 3. While mastering the given discipline students are to take an exam.

The main goal of the discipline is to provide students with the skills necessary to conduct both technical translation and interpretation processes in the course of intercultural communication. Apart from practical skills students acquire profound knowledge in carrying out scientific research on professional level.

While mastering the academic discipline Technical Translation students get to know the basic notions of technical translation as well as the main stages of it. What is more, students are taught to apply the received theoretical knowledge in the course of practical technical translation taking into consideration all significant nuances of contemporary translation process as it is.

Technical translation implies studying types, methods and techniques of translation process. Students are taught to be an intermediary between users of two different languages (Russian and English), whose main target is to achieve successful communication results in technical sphere. They learn to meet constantly changing demands and requirements a modern-day translator/interpreter is to correspond to. As a result, students get a good command of translation skills, techniques and methods of translation in the field of technical translation.

The most important issues students are to cover while studying the given discipline are: Translation Process and its Stages, Main Principles of Translation Text Building, Information Sources in the course of Technical Translation, Translation Units, Grammatical and Stylistic Aspects of technical Translation, Means of Translation, Lexical and Grammatical Transformations in the course of Technical Translation, Theory of Equivalents, Equivalents Levels.

Theory and Methods of Teaching Foreign Languages

The discipline is read for first-year students of a master course (2 semester). The total working intensiveness amounts to 72 academic hours including class work (lectures and seminars) - 30 hours, self-instruction work – 42 hours, revision before an exam – 0 hours).  ECTS equals 2. While mastering the given discipline students are to take one credit.

The main goal of the discipline is to form systematic knowledge about the theory and methods of teaching foreign languages essence; provide students with the skills necessary to form intercultural communication interdisciplinary based.

Apart from the research approach practical skills in teaching foreign languages students acquire self-reflection, self-assessment, and self-study on professional level.

While mastering the academic discipline Theory and Methods of Teaching Foreign Languages students get to know the basic notions of Teaching and Training theory, some up-to-date foreign languages teaching approaches. What is more, students are taught to apply the received theoretical knowledge in the course of Theory and Methods of Teaching Foreign Languages taking into consideration all significant nuances of contemporary School organization and management process as it is and student assessment basis.

Theory and Methods of Teaching Foreign Languages implies studying types, methods and techniques of Teaching Foreign Languages process. Students are taught to maintain teaching activity, use effectively the up-to-date pedagogic technologies while forming and developing the second and first linguistic identity in a pupil, as well as intercultural communicative competence formation.

They learn to meet constantly changing demands and requirements a modern-day specialist is to correspond to. As a result, students get a good command of Teaching Foreign Languages skills, techniques and methods of scientific documentation process on the whole.

The most important issues students are to cover while studying the given discipline are: Language Education, Language Education as a general theory of Teaching foreign languages, Language Identity as a center of Language Education, A Text as the object of Communicative Activity of a man, Language Politics in Linguistic education, Contemporary Approaches to the meaning “communicative competence”, The History of Methods of Teaching Foreign Languages, The contemporary assessment schemes in Teaching Foreign Languages, The Foreign Language Lesson realization in practice.

Sociolinguistics

A discipline "Sociolinguistics" is for first-year students (2 semester) of a master’s program. It is studied for 72 hours (2 credit units). It equals 2 ECTS. While mastering the given discipline students are to take an exam.

Course Description:

This course is the study of the relationship between language and society. We will look at variation at all levels of language and how such variation constructs and is constructed by identity and culture. An exploration of attitudes and ideologies about these varieties will be of particular importance to understanding this relationship. We will also consider some of the educational, political, and social repercussions of these sociolinguistic facts.

Sociolinguistics is a move towards studying language performance, and there are two arguments on why this should be studied within language: 1. Language is an interactive and cultural phenomenon which should be studied. 2. Actual language use is highly structured and not at a random. These arguments split into two strands of sociolinguistics: Interactional Sociolinguistics and Variation Theory of Sociolinguistics. This course will provide you with an introduction to the study of language variationand change, a subject that comprises three closely related disciplines: historicallinguistics (the study of how languages change over time); dialectology (the study ofregional variation in language); and sociolinguistics (the study of the relationships betweenlanguage and society). While we will explore all of these subjects and the interactions amongthem, our main emphasis will be on Sociolinguistics, including both correlationalsociolinguistics (how social factors like age, sex and social class influence language) andmany topics in the sociology of language (the role of language in human behavior andsocial organization). Included among the latter are situations of language contact (pidgins &creoles, multilingualism, etc.) and issues related to disciplines as diverse as anthropology,education, gender & cultural studies, politics, social psychology and sociology.

Aims:

The learning goals for this course are:

• to understand and evaluate current work in sociolinguistics;
• to engage first-hand with contemporary sociolinguistics research and writing;
• to recognize major theoretical, methodological and critical approaches in sociolinguistics.