Abstract:

Online teaching has become an alternative teaching form. Students at Kazan Federal University in Tatarstan in the Russian Federation study English as a Foreign Language as their major subject in preparation for careers in teaching and translation. For language and culture students, actual engagement with native speakers and persons from different cultures remains a key aspect of making these topics more than just subjects for study. Trips overseas and face-to-face visits from persons speaking their native languages and sharing their native cultures may be off limits as departmental resources decline. To address the gap between needs and resources, this paper discusses one example of the exploratory use of the online mode for teaching Linguistic courses in English as a Foreign Language and Sociological courses in Cultural Relations, though online teaching requires more time than traditional classroom teaching. The use of the online mode becomes the key to engage and develop students’ understanding outside of the direct experience method.

This paper presents the methods for teaching language and culture and examples of the first phase of an exploration into cross-cultural use of online. As this project continues, the instructors hope to include synchronic methods and applications into their face-to-face modes and even to move to complete use of the online model for international cooperation. This example has focused on academic engagement, primarily using academic, governmental and popular texts and videos to supplement traditional methods and sources for learning. For future classes, we intend to include these methods as an introduction before moving into task-based methods, materials and online applications for Russian Federation-United States student asynchronous and synchronous problem solving and dialogic models that would center the students rather than the instructors. By using such methods, we hope to move from a ‘sage on the stage’ model of teaching to a ‘guide on the side’ model where students take over their own learning, with instructors facilitating this process rather than leading it. As such, we hope to engender the new wave of self-guided students who can continue their own learning in the absence of the instructor and who can engage beyond the classroom, across borders where problems can be solved before they become larger issues of concern.

Keywords:

Online teaching, English as a Foreign Language, the methods for teaching language, the methods for teaching culture, model of teaching.