Foreign and second language teaching in the USSR

This brief report was written following a fact-finding visit to the Soviet Union in 1962 by a delegation of British education specialists. The visit took place during a determined, centralised drive to improve language teaching.

The author provides contextual information on various school-level institutions, from pre-school upwards, on official attitudes towards the teaching of foreign languages, and on the implementation of the new language teaching policies. Having observed teacher training at first hand, the author provides fascinating information on the institutes visited, features of the courses, and the staff. Following a brief analysis of language teaching in practice, there is then a description of the teaching aids available. The last three sections provide comments on the results of language teaching overall, a brief discussion of bilingual and multilingual approaches and overall conclusions regarding the USSR’s language teaching strengths and weaknesses.

This book is free to download below as a pdf file.

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