INCORPORATING INTERVIEWING INSTRUCTION INTO JOURNALISM CURRICULA IN RUSSIA: THE EXPERIENCE OF HOLDING AN INTERVIEWING CONTEST FOR FUTURE JOURNALISTS

Interviewing is considered a crucial competence for a journalist. Despite the increasing desire of contemporary employers to recruit graduates from journalism schools who possess basic relevant competencies and significant professional experience, incorporating sufficient interviewing instruction into existing journalism curricula is far from straightforward.

This paper describes the factors specific to the Russian higher education environment that make the effective teaching of interviewing skills particularly problematic. It then relates the experience of teachers and students at a state university in Moscow as they attempted to build such competence via the pedagogical mechanism of an interviewing contest for teams of future journalists. Some aspects of enhancing students’ linguistic skills are also addressed as the specifications of holding the contest in a foreign language are given.

In addition to a description of the procedure for holding such a contest, the paper also reports the impact of this training on the students’ interviewing competence. It concludes with a discussion of the resultant implications for teaching interviewing within Russian university settings.