Abstract:

Globalisation and internationalisation of higher education has brought some important changes into the content and structure of many educational programmes of Russian technical universities. The number of international students who have chosen to study in Russia is constantly growing and many of them choose English but not Russian as the language of instruction. Russian technical university content teachers have faced the challenge of designing and delivering educational courses in English. Developing educational courses and teaching in English is considered a challenge by many technical university content teachers as it requires both sufficient language proficiency and certain skills in English for teaching purposes. National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU) has introduced a system of advanced training in English as a medium of instruction (EMI) for content teachers to help them design and deliver their courses, deal with student motivation and classroom interaction in English. The authors describe the issue of methodical readiness of a technical university content teacher to deliver education courses in English and analyse the system of advanced training courses in EMI. The system consists of three training programmes focused on providing a technical university content teacher with pedagogical tools to design and implement educational courses of non-linguistic profile in English into the teaching and learning process. The authors present their vision of a blended educational course design in English for international students which has been developed by a content teacher, one of the authors, after completing her advanced training in EMI. The paper also considers the impact of the teacher’s role in instructing students with varying degrees of motivation. The lower the student motivation is the higher should be the teacher’s activity. The course designed suggests the possible ways of dealing with student motivation issues. The successful testing of the course has proved the high quality of the advanced training programmes in EMI for TPU academic staff. The system serves to raise content teachers’ motivation to deliver educational courses in English which are in high demand in TPU.

Keywords:

Advanced training courses, modern teaching technologies, English language, blended learning, electronic environment, international students, motivation.