Presentation

The class aims to develop the students' language, methodological and subject-specific skills necessary for successful completion of their university studies in Russia.

The first objective of the seminar is to improve the students' four language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) in Russian, in order to facilitate their future integration into the Master's program at RUDN (Moscow). The documents used for the comprehension exercises (articles, videos) are exclusively related to the humanities. This work will enable students to acquire the vocabulary and syntactic structures necessary for the comprehension and production of oral and written texts, in the context of university studies.

The second objective is for students to develop knowledge of the Russian academic environment and the different forms of academic work carried out in Russia. It involves discovering the standards and criteria that apply to the main types of written and oral work.

Recommended Prerequisite(s)

Russian level B2-C1.

Educational formula

The class sessions are divided into a theoretical and a practical part. The documents used in class are exclusively about themes related to the social sciences and humanities. These documents, as well as the assignments, are structured around three issues: the challenges and implications of the higher education reform in Russia; history and memory in post-Soviet Russia: "the cumbersome past"; can one speak of a civil society in Russia today?

At the end of the semester, students will be asked to hand in dossiers about topics discussed in class. The dossier must be written in Russian, and an oral summary of the dossier (about five minutes), also in Russian, will be presented during the last session of the semester.