The model of the university environment in foreign language: design, implementation and administration
The article puts under scrutiny the administrative approach of the Ural Federal University as one of the participants of the Russian Academic Excellence Project (Project 5-100) to the creation of the environment in foreign language. The article gives recommendations on development of the environment on foreign language for universities aiming at entering the global educational and scientific space. The creation and development of such environment is considered inevitable for all universities striving for internationalization of education and research. Special rile belongs to English as instrument of international communication. English is the working language for the majority of peer-reviewed scientific journals in all scientific fields, for programs of academic mobility as well as for other activities which characterize the interaction with foreign colleagues in the field of education and research. Ural Federal University, along with other universities participating in the Russian Academic Excellence Project, was under necessity to take active efforts in the field of developing English language proficiency among academic and administrative university staff in order to be able to increase the research output in the foreign peer-reviewed journals, participate in international conferences, design English-medium study programs for foreign students and create comfortable working conditions for international professors. The authors claim that there exists experience in the field of creating foreign language environment gained over five years of the so called Program of Development of the university which is sufficient for the primary analysis. Using the case study method, the article aims at showing to what extent the efforts of the Ural Federal University in the field of creating foreign language environment contributed to the fulfillment of the university indicators of the Road Map of the project of enhancement of academic competitiveness. The article sets the goal to conduct the analysis of the university efforts in creating English language environment on the basis of open sources as well as using data available for insiders only. The authors come to the conclusion that the UrFU efforts do not influence the fulfillment of the internationalization indicators in any tangible way in the short-term perspective. This is due to the ad hoc design of the English language environment of the university: the initial benchmarking as partial; the was no placement testing of the staff; the need to measure the progress in the research output of the academics who participated in the English language training was not considered from the beginning of the project. Notwithstanding these deficiencies, the practices of the creating the English language environment at UrFU were of systemic nature and their results will constitute the basis for the creating of the large-scale strategy of the administration of the foreign language university environment. The limitations of the findings of the article are connected with the unique local, regional and national context of universities (Jane Knight, 2004). Nevertheless, the considerations oaf the article may be used for the design, analysis and development of the foreign language environment of universities. The article is the first case study based research of the design and administration process of the foreign language environment of the university of its kind.