Towards Infiltration of English into Academic Studies at Non-Linguistic Departments
The study seeks to bridge the gap between providing a non-linguistic university education in the native language, as required by the federal legislation of Russia, and imparting the essential skills of processing theoretical information in English in order to involve Russian students into the international scholarly community. This calls for an approach to teaching theoretical disciplines that resorts to English as an activator of processing information received in Russian, with neither the students nor the teacher of a professionally-focused discipline feeling frustrated by linguistic challenges. The key to the problem can be seen, first, in the chiefly receptive use of English and, second, in demonstrating how helpful an English passage can be, with its clarity, precision and compression. To make it feasible in the 3rd and 4th years, the course of English offered in the 1st and 2nd years might include native-language fragments of a written or audio academic lecture for correlating information in the two languages in order to compress it, to see whether all the relevant characteristics of the object are mentioned in both sources or whether the authors disagree on some points. The paper illustrates the approach suggested emphasizing the fusion and interdependence of language-oriented and intellectual professionally-focused objectives, with professional awareness helping to cope with language challenges, and language-focused tasks contributing to intellectual skills formation.