Open Access Library Journal
Vol.04 No.03(2017), Article ID:74622,7 pages
10.4236/oalib.1103471

Russian Language Teaching in College under the New Situation

Yu Mao

Yantai Nanshan College, Longkou, China

Copyright © 2017 by author and Open Access Library Inc.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY 4.0).

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Received: February 20, 2017; Accepted: March 6, 2017; Published: March 9, 2017

ABSTRACT

Since the 21st century, the cooperation between China and Russia becomes more frequently in the fields of economics, tourism, politics, military, and culture and so on. The new situation makes an urgent need of versatile and practical talents who are both proficient in the expertise and familiar with Russian. Therefore, the Russian language teaching in college has drawn widely attention. This paper combines the reform and practice of college Russian teaching to make a review of the teaching methods of Russian language under the new situation.

Subject Areas:

Education, Linguistics

Keywords:

Russian Language, Russian Teaching, Classroom Teaching

1. Introduction

College Russian teaching is critical to the training of versatile and practical talents adapted to the now situation. The research about how to improve the level of the college Russian teaching and creatively carry out the teaching work in order to train high qualified talents has become an important theme in the applied common Russian language teaching subject. In China, the language environment is non-Russian; most Russian language teaching is under the guidance of teachers to study in the classroom and textbooks. The environment of communication using Russian after class is lack; students learn the Russian language depending on the classroom teaching rather than edification of the Russian language environment. This reality makes the students feel this course boring and pure theoretical. The time of the Russian teaching is long; the number of students is large and in different starting levels. The students have accomplished the learning of their mother tongue, and formed basically mature thinking. The majority of teachers are Chinese; the proportion of foreign teachers is very small; this reality determines the Russian teaching in China can only be a foreign language teaching. Whether the teaching method is reasonable and whether the traditional inculcating way of teaching can be changed is very important to the teaching effect. So, continuous research and practice of the Russian teaching methods are crucial to the Russian teaching.

2. According to the Principle of “Student-Oriented” to Determine the Teaching Content

2.1. Student-Oriented, Emphasizing the Central Position of Students

Student-oriented: Highlight the central position of students in the teaching pro- cess, emphasize the manners of respect, understand and care for students, continuously meet the effective demands of students and promote the students’ integrated development in the Russian language learning. Actively expand the learning channels for students, encourage students to make full use of college courses, network courses, resource base, library, training room and other resources for independent learning, to promote the students’ ability of adapted to social deve- lopment. At present, many domestic employers and Chinese enterprises in foreign countries are in urgent need of Russian talents, but the Russian-trained personnel by college cannot meet the needs of the society, therefore, Russian teachers should always put the integrated development and effective demands of students in the primary position, and indeed put the thinking of ‘Student-oriented’ into implement [ [1] , p. 80]. How to implement, that requires the teachers in the lectures to start with the key attention points, concern sensitivity, emotional excitement points and ideological confusion points of students.

2.2. Level-Oriented, Selecting Textbooks

Textbook is the carrier of teaching content and the basis of teaching practice. A high level textbook will undoubtedly provide a solid guarantee for the quality of teaching. Textbook should be selected according to students’ learning levels, and should have certain degree of difficulty, strong pertinence and readability. Through one year learning, the students can further improve their oral, reading, comprehension, translation and other comprehensive capabilities. Taking the non-Russian majors of Yantai Nanshan University for example, our teachers selected the book under the title “New Russian Integrated Course” as the mainly textbook considering the students’ learning time, which is published by the Higher Education Press and edited by He Hongmei and Ma Buning [ [2] , p. 95]. This textbook takes the Russian language knowledge, application skills, learning strategies and cross- cultural communication as the main contents, takes the foreign language teaching theory as the guidance, and unites a variety of teaching models and teaching methods as one of the teaching system. The aim of the course is to cultivate students’ comprehensive application ability in Russian, so as to enable them to effectively communicate in both oral and written manners using Russian language in their future works and social lives, meanwhile, enhance students’ self-learning ability and comprehensive cultural quality to meet our country’s economic development and international communication needs. These contents and aims coincide with the purpose of training applied talents in our school. In recent years, our teaching effect is relatively ideal, which makes the students feel the interest, obtaining and usefulness of the learning.

3. According to the Actual Conditions to Realize the Teaching Objectives

3.1. Regard Culture Influence, Enhance Students’ Comprehensive Quality

The students learning Russian language should firstly be influenced by the Russian-speaking countries’ cultures; this is a unanimous thought of the teachers and should be the have to considering problem and common goal in the Russian language teaching [ [3] , p. 124]. So, in order to enhance the students’ comprehensive quality, the teachers should not only impart the language knowledge, but also explain Russia’s national conditions and culture information throughout classroom teaching. By this, students can learn and understand the Russian people’s living customs, behavior manners, thinking ways and interpersonal communication models which will guide students to appreciate the culture implied in the Russian language reduce barriers to cross-cultural communication and improve their verbal communication skills.

3.2. Use Multimedia and Network Teaching, Enrich Teaching Approaches

The biggest difference between learning foreign language and mother tongue is the lack of corresponding language environment, while language environment is the necessary condition for the existence of a language, leaving the specific environment, language can only be abstract symbols. The main reason of Russian language teaching in college making little achievements is the traditional “blackboard-text- book” teaching mode which is monotonous, abstract and rigid. To some extent, Russian language teaching is the creation of a language environment, it should be able to create an inspired, high morale and active teaching scene, so that the spiritless course can changed to a lively big stage and everyone is an important role on the stage [ [4] , p. 74]. Multimedia technology is one of the best methods of Russian teaching in college, it can create a teaching environment which integrates authenticity, communicative, knowledge and interest. College students have relatively strong image-thinking ability; using multimedia teaching can intuitively deepen students’ understanding about teaching content, inject vitality into the modern teaching mode, and stimulate students’ learning interest from the visual perception. Therefore, the design ideas of courseware should be novel, unique, illustrated and humorous. Except for using those well-prepared course wares, tea- chers can also play some songs or wonderful movies for teaching, to complete the boring listening training in edutainment and improve the learning efficiency. But these multimedia course wares should be beneficial complement to the traditional teaching methods, rather than alternative of the blackboard-writing or simply piercing together of the characters and pictures in the textbook. The multimedia course wares should be vivid display of the teachers’ educational thought, teaching philosophy, teaching art and teaching skill. Russian teachers should continuously improve their professional skill and capability of flexible use of multimedia technology, in order to give better and more effective service for the improvement of the Russian classroom efficiency. After class, teachers and students can interact by building network classroom. Teachers upload teaching materials of the course to the Internet and make improvement constantly; students learn the knowledge including those not mentioned by the teachers in the classroom through network. They can also submit homework by e-mail, to achieve networked of the homework grading and mentoring [ [5] , p. 43]. This will greatly improve the teach- ing effectiveness.

4. Cultivating Students’ Self-Study Ability and Self-Study Habits

4.1. Cultivating Students’ Self-Study Ability

Future illiteracy is not a person without knowledge, but the one lack of self-study ability. Self-study ability is a reflection of students’ autonomy. The 21st century is the era of knowledge and information explosion, the speed of knowledge update is tremendous, as a character carrier; the Russian language arises new vocabularies and newspeaks endlessly. Having no consciously self-study opinion, the intention of using Russian language to better understand Russia is an improbable thing, so in the classroom the teachers should patiently inculcate the lifelong learning idea which is known as “Live and learn”. In fact, to master a foreign lan- guage, it’s not enough just rely on learning in the classroom; it’s also rely on students’ self-study after school and even after graduation. So, in addition to teaching knowledge in the classroom, the teachers should also frequently taught to students the methods of acquire knowledge. During the process of cultivating students’ self-study ability, the teachers should let students to obtain a sense of accomplishment, thus stimulating their learning interest [ [6] , p. 101]. Therefore, Russian teaching should fully play the students’ master role in learning, inspire students threw themselves into learning with confidence, make them hold the Russian learning rules, develop their independent self-study ability, and enhance their self-education and self-regulation abilities. The purpose is to make students not only “having learned” but also “doing well in learning”, and lay the foundation for students’ lifelong learning.

4.2. Cultivating Students’ Good Self-Study Habits

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are both objectives and means of teaching. If we conscious training students to form the good habits of more listening, boldly speaking, diligent reading and writing from the beginning of teaching, will bring fundamental influence to the effectiveness of Russian language teaching and students’ self-study ability cultivation. First, in the aspect of listening, we should provide conditions for students, offer sufficient listening material, to cultivate good listening habits which are enjoy, frequent and attend to listen. In the aspect of speaking, we should cultivate students’ good speaking habits which are willing, daring and aloud to speak. In the aspect of reading, students should be required to read diligently, loudly and accurately, whether single character’s pronounce or words’ spell and tone should be read precisely, clearly and proficiently. In the aspect of writing, students should be required to form the writing habits of diligently and neatly written, to overcome shortcomings of illegible handwriting, randomly altered and ignoring punctuation. Furthermore, in all of the four aspects, the cultivation of reading ability is particularly important, because good reading ability can lay a solid foundation for students to acquire Russian knowledge in a lifetime. Students can accumulate a variety of knowledge through wide reading [ [7] , p. 120]. It’s the trouble thing to subscribe for original Russian ma- gazines, newspapers and books, but the Internet can just to make up for this regret. After class, students can always use this cheap, high-quality and fast tool to know the world’s latest information about politics, economics, culture, tourism and so on. Beyond that, teachers should guide students to look up Russian documents utilizing network, recommend reference books, and introduce methods and skills of consulting literature, in order to enable students really effectively using Russian language as a tool to obtain their required information. Moreover, the habit of consulting the dictionary should also be cultivated. In short, during the process of course teaching, teachers should always put cultivating students’ good Russian language learning habits into an important position. As forms of language activity, listening, speaking, reading and writing are mutually influence and promote. Listening and speaking are helpful for reading and writing, reading and writing can consolidate listening and speaking, they supplement and bring out the best in each other. Hence, cultivating good habits of listening, speaking, and reading and writing, students’ Russian language diathesis will be necessarily improved as time passes.

5. Interactive Teaching, Improving Russian Teachers’ Professional Quality and Self-Cultivation

5.1. Interacting with Students, to Show the Charm of Language

Language is the tool used to change ideas between people. If in the class, the teachers keep on talking on the platform with the students passively accepting knowledge, then, it’s not the real sense of classroom teaching as we said; it should be remote Correspondence Teaching or remote self-examination training. The classroom teaching of college is face to face with teachers and students together, if teachers do not pay attention to inspire students to ask questions, but just repeat what the textbook says, and let students learn by rote, the students will inevitably lose interest in learning a foreign language as time passes. As a result, they cannot enhance their scores, pass the band four tests, not to mention play an important role in the future work using Russian. Certainly, in the classroom, teacher’s talk is indispensable. The talk should have a certain level, pay attention to the art of language, and have magnetism to attract students to interact naturally. Therefore, teachers should enhance the artistic accomplishment of language, and improve the artistic effect of classroom teaching. Classroom teaching itself is the art of language, because the task of classroom teaching is completed by the teacher’s language. The quality of teacher’s expression reflects both the teacher’s teaching ability and level, and it will directly affect the effect of classroom teaching. In the limited time of classroom teaching, teacher’s language expression ability is an important condition to complete teaching tasks and attract students. Smart organization of language using vivid, accurate, refined and philosophical words to express rich and interested content, is the embodiment of teaching art. Sublimating language art can eliminate the weariness of learning, and mobilize the students’ thought regular in an active state, to improve the actual teaching effect [ [8] , p. 65]. Then, the sublimation of language art is directly related to the interaction between teachers and students; this interaction is natural, blending and infectious.

5.2. Improving Teachers’ Professional Quality and Self-Cultivation

The solid professional quality and good self-cultivation of the Russian teachers are the key to improve the quality of Russian teaching. Many teachers seem powerless facing the advanced teaching equipments, which indirectly lead to the idle and waste of these advanced teaching equipments. Therefore, the training of modern educational technology, teaching strategy and methods is essential for the teachers. In the training, it is necessary to first solve the problem of updating the educational philosophy of Russian teachers and changing their teaching mode. The updating of the educational philosophy and the change of the teaching mode need the teachers’ collective participation, and need be carried out gradually through lecture, reading, discussion, observation and other learning experience. Meanwhile, these also need the active supports from teachers and competent departments.

Students need to constantly learn, while Russian teachers must also be lifelong learners. Now and future society is a learning society, as an initiator of knowledge, teacher should insist lifelong learning and continuous self-improvement. At ordinary times, teachers should be good at taking the time to accumulate the experiments and inspirations getting from the usual teaching, answering the students’ questions or correcting homework. And then teachers should further study the new methods of Russian teaching, take the initiative to adjust their knowledge structure and broaden their knowledge vision. Only in this way, the teachers can keep up with the times, improve their work efficiency, students can increase interest in learning, change passive learning to active participate, so as to achieve good teaching effect [ [9] , p. 89].

6. Conclusion

In conclusion, foreign language is one of the compulsory basic courses for college students, and is also a necessary way to improve the comprehensive quality of college students to adapt to the needs of the times. Nowadays, education and teaching are still facing many actual difficulties, such as students’ learning initiative is not high; attention degree is not enough; teaching facilities conditions are limited, and so on. However, as long as Russian teachers continue to strengthen the research of Russian teaching methods, constantly sum up experience, improve their level of knowledge and self-cultivation, and timely absorption and use the achievements of foreign language teaching at home and aboard, we will certainly be able to continuously enhance the Russian teaching level, improve teaching effect, drastically raise students’ abilities of language application and cross-cultural communication, and train out more and better professionals who are proficient in applying Russian language for our country.

Cite this paper

Mao, Y. (2017) Russian Language Teaching in College under the New Situation. Open Access Library Jour- nal, 4: e3471. https://doi.org/10.4236/oalib.1103471

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