Abstract:

Education authorities and stakeholders both in Russia and worldwide put a lot of emphasis on STEM and related areas. This, paired with requirement for educational mobility, calls for new approaches to teaching both foreign languages and STEM subjects. Even through these factors do not provoke any questions as such, they are a significant challenge for undergraduates, members of academia, university administration and school authorities. Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) methodology has been around for a over 30 years, yet the implementation of this methodology, especially in higher education, especially in Russia, is still not trouble free. Isolated success stories are overshadowed by numerous cases of educators who are eager to use CLIL methodology and later, demotivated and desperate, put it aside. This leaves the whole system deadlocked, as without school teachers who are CLIL-ready, we cannon have CLIL-ready undergraduates and, thus, a new generation of teachers. In this submission we share our experiences of teaching Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics in English, as well as teaching English to students majoring in these subjects. Thus, we look at the range of challenges and issues that educators, teachers and administrators have to deal with at various stages of implementation of this project. We look into such matters as local education policy, i.e. the motivations behind the decision to introduce bilingual education into a traditionally monolingual curriculum and peer collaboration, i.e. expected and actual collaboration scenarios between teachers of Science and English at various stages of project implementation. Significant emphasis is placed on the motivation of students and educators involved in the project. One of the key challenges for all parties involved was the actual or perceived lack of either subject or language expertise, which called for ad hoc peer-education arrangements. We look at the prior educational background of both educators and students participating in the project in order to workout the implementation strategy which would make the most of their prior educational experiences. The recent COVID-19 crisis which was a major challenge for many educators worldwide significantly influenced our project and, paradoxically, mitigated some of the issues that we have to encounter in the classroom. A large portion of the submission is devoted to the problem of teaching materials. One of the key challenged that we had to face was to find the balance between 'hard' and 'soft' CLIL based on both language proficiency of the students, existing curriculum and resources available.

Keywords:

CLIL, bilingual education, education in Russia, STEM, academic mobility, bilingual teaching, ELT, ESP.