RESEARCH-BASED CURRICULUM FOR UNIVERSITY FRESHMEN INTERNATIONALIZATION

The paper explores ways to enhance university freshmen internationalization through research-led curriculum.

The current importance of the topic can be justified by the paramount significance of research activities that international education stakeholders and the overall international education community underline when mapping and outlining university success stories of higher education development worldwide.
The research methodology stands on the following:
• the phenomenon of internationalization to bring up internationally competitive specialists [Altbach, 2016, Lambert, Usher, 2013],
• the concept of research-led curriculum to develop critical thinking, creativity,, knowledge mining and processing skills [Miller et al 2013],
• the concept of content and language integrated learning to make students perform professional tasks in multilingual environment [Coyle et al 2010]
• the policy of integrating formal and non-formal learning of university students to enhance their first-hand experience of future carrier requirements [Leask, 2009].

The research stages comprised relevant literature review and empirical analysis of university freshmen’ engagement in research-led content and language integrated formal and non-formal learning.

The empirical research was carried out at the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia and involved full-time first year domestic and international students of the graduate school of law and international students of pre-university course on the Russian Language with their further application to MSc or PhD courses in Medicine and Agrarian studies.

The experiment training focus integrated the formal curriculum and students’ non-formal extracurricular activities that included participation in international research events, volunteering activities in the area of students’ future academic studies and professional activities, engagement in conferences on professional topics, participation in cross-cultural activities related to the University-based professional development.

The empirical studies included the observation of students’ engagement in the above activities, the analysis of resources they used to perform relevant assignments, students’ aptitude to form project groups for the purposeful activity, etc.

Totally 118 first year students were engaged in the experiment that lasted for the academic year.

The statistic data processing included cluster and factor analysis.

The research findings proved that university freshmen research-led curriculum can be run efficiently in various academic domains. The experiment findings made it possible to indetify internationalization weightings in terms of students’ research-led formal and non-formal content and language integrated learning activities. The research proved that the goal of fostering the university freshmen internationalization through research-led curriculum could be reached if based on the integrated comprehensive approached, carefully planned, structured, monitored and promoted. The idea, meaning and values of research-led curriculum for academic studies internationalization should be articulated to all stakeholders involved, the internationalization practice should be consistently integrated in the overall education process.