If you have studied any language before, you know what to expect in a traditional class. However, you might discover that the educational culture in the Russia is different to your home country. Your professors at IACLD CPE ANCO will be expert yet informal and you can call them by their first names. IACLD CPE ANCO classes have a stress-free atmosphere as we believe that you learn better when you are in a stress-free, comfort and informal atmosphere. LANGUAGE LEARNING IS A SKILL FOR LIFE
At IACLD CPE ANCO we teach through our topic-based negotiated syllabus. In theory “a negotiated syllabus involves the teacher and the learners working together to make decisions at the parts of the curriculum design process” (Nation & Macalister, 2010: 149). It provides learners’ active involvement in the shared tasks of developing a syllabus via the process of negotiating with the teacher. Breen & Littlejohn (2000: 1) describes negotiated syllabus as “the discussion between all members of the classroom to decide how learning and teaching are to be organized.” Due to the shift towards learner centeredness, autonomy and collaboration in language teaching, negotiated syllabus has gained importance in curriculum design process in most of language teaching contexts.
In practice, in IACLD CPE ANCO there are a lot of language teaching settings, but probably the most intensive and principled ones are the short-term intensive Russian language programs. These programs provide intensive language courses to the students in various levels for general and professional purposes. The program starts immediately with the beginning of the new academic year and continues to the end of it. At the end of an academic year, the students take a proficiency exam and whether they pass the program is determined according to their scores in this exam.
As these short-term intensive programs are quite loaded and massive ones. There are of course several issues leading to some problems which is related to the curriculum design process. It is inspiring for IACLD CPE ANCO to make a decision on the syllabus that will appeal to the learners who come from different socio-cultural and economic backgrounds with different levels of language proficiency, needs and wants. We place you in classes suitable for your age and level and design a course program for your particular group. We listen to you and incorporate, we personalise the program for you, and as a result we can improve those aspects of your Russian that you most need or are interested in.
THE REASONS WHY WE IMPLEMENT THE NEGOTIATED SYLLABUS IN SHORT-TERM INTENSIVE PROGRAMS
When short-term intensive programs are analysed carefully in terms of syllabus decision process, which is implemented carefully and in a planned way may have several advantages for teachers and learners in short-term intensive programs in teaching process.
These are the most situations which are also the common points of short-term intensive programs in Russia and the conditions in which a negotiated syllabus is almost unavoidable:
