Last week saw Bethan Edwards, SLC’s Academic Director (2nd left on the photo above), deliver an intensive 3-day course to a group of 18 Russian lecturers at Sechenov Medical University in Moscow, Russia's leading medical school, all of whom teach in English to international students at the university.
SLC had been invited by Professor Irina Markovina, Director of the university’s Linguistics and Intercultural Communication Department to create a bespoke training programme to support the increasing internationalisation taking place at Sechenov. The participants were all Medicine, Pharmacy and Linguistics lecturers.
And no, the training wasn’t in medical or pharmaceutical English – SLC’s usual fare – the participants were all pretty good at that. Instead, Bethan’s programme gave them the language they need to deliver effective lectures, seminars and tutorials to their students in English. Modules included the following:
- Setting rules
- Giving instructions
- Checking learning
- Checking understanding
- Giving feedback
- Language for managing pairs and small groups
- Language for classroom management
- Language for presentations
- Pronunciation for presentations
- Managing discussions
- Using effective pronunciation and intonation
The programme included lots of practical application as the lecturers worked both individually and in small groups. At the end of the third day, they all gave a brief presentation to showcase their new language skills, which clearly showed the progress they had made over the duration of the course.
Finally, participants received certificates from both the university and SLC, and everyone celebrated with caviar, honey cake and tea!
Feedback from the participants was overwhelmingly positive, with a 100% recommendation score and everyone saying how useful the course had been.
“Bethan was great. Thanks to her!”
“Our teacher was a very creative person during our classes. She used different activities, different materials. It was very interesting!”
“Each moment of the course was important.”
“We had the opportunity not only to learn new useful phrases and communication approaches, but also to practise it with colleagues and tutor.”
“Thank you for your fantastic work!”
We’re also working with Sechenov in other ways, providing customised versions of our online courses for their medicine and pharmacy students, and developing an online Anglo-Russian English for Medicine course.
This teacher training course has been a great way of strengthening the partnership between SLC and Sechenov and we look forward very much to continuing to work together.
