Area of comfort: Russian language training for Vietnamese students at technical university

Abstract

The paper focuses on the psychological and pedagogical peculiarities of teaching Russian to students from Vietnam. The methodology approach taken in this study is motivated by ideas of active Learning articulated by Verbitcky and the Motivation theory developed by Maslow and Yakimanskaya. The methodological basis of the research is a student-centered learning approach. The author provides a theoretical framework based on the communicative competence concept elaborated by Viatiutnev in area of theory and methods Russian as foreign language. Our qualitative methodology included interviews with students, review of documents and analysis of educational results. The authors use Smekal and Kucher’s Questionnaire to identify psychological characteristics of Vietnamese students and offer a solution to the problem of effective teaching with due consideration of the students’ cultural features. The authors present the research findings on the personality orientation of Vietnamese students enrolled in National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University. In general, we systematize suggestions for Russian Language teachers who work with international students from Vietnam.

Keywords: Internationalization of educationstudent-centered approachethno-cultural approachpersonality orientation

Introduction

The modern paradigm of higher education is characterized by openness and integration into the world educational space. Currently, one of the criteria for the competitiveness of the Russian higher education is the number of international students. Where anent, the internationalization of a higher education system is one of the leading trends of its development. The country's leading universities annually increase the volume of export of their educational services by expanding the geography of their users. In some cases, citizens' education in Russian universities is a part of the state policy of countries. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is a great example of this tendency. The implementation of training programs for various sectors of the Vietnamese economy in the Russian higher educational institutions has been carried out since 2002. Students enrolled in this program take a competitive test in Vietnam and then receive substantial government support, such as scholarships for the studying period. National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University has been a member of this program since 2003, and there are 200 students from Vietnam currently enrolled.

The number of international students studying in Russian universities has increased. This fact requires methodological understanding of problems associated with international education as well as developing an ethnic and cultural approach to learning. This field is of current interest in scientific research.

However, most research is devoted to the problems of teaching the Russian language to students from China, the number of which is increasing year after year due to the nature of the geopolitical and economic situation. Some works describe the system of Russian language teaching in Chinese universities, (Liu, 2004; Salosina, & Ishutina, 2014; Li, 2015) and others. Some studies represent a comprehensive description of linguo-didactic models (Balykhina, 2009, 2010, 2013) and teaching methods (Zolotykh, 2012), etc. As part of the ethnocultural approach, TPU implemented several projects: "Portrait of the educational migrant”, No. 10-01-64102, 2010-2011, "Chinese educational migrants in the Russian academic environment”, No. 12-31-01298 / 12, 2012-2013. These projects were supported by the Russian Humanitarian Science Foundation and were aimed to investigate the particularities of the teaching process for students from China. Tis ideas developed by Kosheleva, & Samofalova, (2011).

The particular nature of teaching Russian to Vietnamese students does not receive due consideration in the scientific literature. There are some doctoral research works on the problems of teaching grammar in a technical college (Nguyen, 2003), the training of future philologists (Hoang, 2005), a series of works analyzes the difficulties of language interference (Sherina, & Nguyen, 2015).

International science takes an integrated approach to this problem. They study the problems of adaptation and socialization of Vietnamese students in the host society and in their motherlands (Anh, 2014), motivation to learn (Miller, & Div, 2012), the development of certain types of speech activity when teaching English to Vietnamese (Dan, 2008; Nguyen, 2008).

Nowadays, the effect of psychological characteristics of students from Vietnam on the process of teaching the Russian language in a technical college is not studied enough, hence the relevance of the research topic as well as its purpose: to identify the psychological and pedagogical aspects of teaching the Russian language to Vietnamese students. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to accomplish the following objectives:

• to determine the characteristics of the personality orientation of students;

• to identify the specifics of their mental representations of the teacher image;

• to develop proposals for the implementation of the ethno-cultural approach to teaching the Russian language to Vietnamese students.

Methodology and analysis

The methodological basis of the research is the ideas of humanistic psychology, Maslow (1954), the concept of hierarchy of needs of a person belonging to a group, respect and self-actualization. In Russia, these theses are developed in the framework of a student-centered approach to teaching. So, Yakimanskaya (1984,1989,1994) claims that organizing and planning the learning process requires, first of all, taking into account the "identity, self-worth, and personal experience of each student" (1994). It is essential to identify these criteria and match them with the content of education. Vyatyutnev (1984) was the first to tackle the task of implementing the principles of student-centered approaches in teaching Russian as a second language in higher education institutions.

Relying on modern educational concepts, we have substantiated the need for studying the personality orientation of students in the development of Russian language teaching technologies. The personality orientation reflects the peculiarities of the national character of students and defines the relationship of participants in the educational process. This is the novelty of the study.

The theoretical significance of the research: we prove that training international students in higher education institutions requires taking into account particularities of their previous educational systems, including the mental representation of the image of the teacher and the model of the educational process as well as national-cultural and individual personal characteristics of students. In this vein, the teacher of the Russian language plays a special role –that of a guide to the culture. The teacher is responsible for speech and behavioral survival algorithms of implementation in other socio-cultural and educational environment.

Research and results

The study was conducted at the Institute of International Education and Language Communication of National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University (IIELC NR TPU) in 2015. It involved Vietnamese students enrolled in the basic educational programs of TPU. Most of them are in their first or second year of study.

The experiment had three phases. At first, we analyzed the scores of international students in the Test of Russian as a Foreign Language (TORFL), level 1, for the period from 2010 to 2015. The students took the test at the Center for Testing of Foreign Nationals of the Department of Russian as a Foreign Language after mastering the elementary and basic level of the Russian language at the Preparatory Department.

Results of the analysis are presented in Table 1 : the average scores (%) of the entire testing group in various sections of the course (A) and the average scores (%) of students from Vietnam (B).

We can see a downward trend in the overall average results in all the speaking activities as well as vocabulary and grammar.

According to both students and teachers, speaking is the most difficult exam. The lowest average score of the group is 64% (2015) and 67% (2015) for Vietnamese students; the highest is 74.8 (2011, group) and 83.4, (2013, Vietnamese students).

Starting 2014, there has been a sharp drop in the scores in reading, which has traditionally been easy to pass: maximum 89% (2010) and92% (2010) for Vietnamese students; minimum 66% (2015) in both groups.

The results are presented in a more illustrative way in the following diagram containing the data of the average overall score in percent. If we compare two graphs, we can conclude that despite some regression in both the groups’ scores, students from Vietnam consistently score better than the overall group.

See Full Size >

The overall downward trend stems from many factors:

• A greater number of international students come from South-East Asia. It takes them more time to master the program, since their native tongue has significant differences from the Russian language they are learning;

• A greater share of students including those from Vietnam study on a contractual basis;

• Succession of generations: current school graduates do not read much even in their native tongue, acquire most information on the Internet and use new-generation software that instantaneously translates large amounts of textual information.

Nonetheless, the trend of Vietnamese students getting better test scores is still consistent. In this connection, a teacher who works with groups including students from Vietnam has to take into account the high level of educational demands from this student category.

The second stage of the experimental activity involved determining the personality orientation of students from Vietnam. We used Smekal and Kucher’s Questionnaire that singles out three groups of personality orientation: personal (to oneself), community (to cooperation), and practical (to a task). Thirty people answered questions by choosing two of the three options that best and worst describe their opinion. Most intentions the respondents chose were related to personal and practical orientation. Let us comment on some results. We have arranged the answers into sense groups.

Conclusion

Thus, the external research findings (the analysis of the test results on the Russian language, the Smekal and Kucher’s questionnaire) as well as the internal ones (the questionnaire drawn up by the student) have led to the following conclusions:

• Most Vietnamese students are oriented towards completing a task and have an expressed desire to be a leader.

• The task of a Russian language teacher is to create the "safe learning environment" as a basis to develop each student’s abilities, including the elimination of psychological barriers through the development of subject-subject relations among the participants of the educational process.

• The preparatory stage of work with the group includes a comprehensive diagnosis of the students’ level of the foreign (Russian) language skills and educational needs to adjust the content and to choose the optimal training technology.

Interactive teaching methods are most effective (contests, competitions, discussions, brainstorming, role-playing and simulation games, etc.) in the process of teaching the Russian language to students from Vietnam. These methods promote self-actualization of the student personality.

Acknowledgements

The article is published with the financial support of the Russian Humanitarian Science Foundation, the project "Study of object-oriented educational environment as a factor of communicative competence formation of foreign students of engineering profile”, No. 15-16-700002;

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