Academics

The Russian Overseas Flagship Program offers intensive, highly-individualized language instruction. Through homestays and a wide range of extracurricular activities, participants also enjoy unprecedented opportunities to immerse themselves in daily local life and culture.

The academic program is classroom intensive, with approximately 25 academic hours per week spent in class. In addition, Flagship participants devote 4 hours weekly to individual work with a language tutor. The academic week for the fall semester is five days long with occasional modifications to allow for field trips and excursions. In addition, participants directly enroll in one subject-matter course, taught in Russian, in their area of specialization at al-Farabi Kazakh National University. During the spring semester, students attend classes four days a week, as one day a week is devoted entirely to professional internship activities. Both semesters culminate in a formal presentation written in the Russian academic style and based on students’ direct enrollment and internship experiences.

The majority of classes proceed through unifying program themes addressing various topics in the areas of politics, economics, culture, history, and sociology. Courses are designed to complement each other in developing participants’ overall communicative competence in the Russian language. Individual tutorials help to integrate and clarify regular classroom material, while also addressing each student’s personal needs as an advanced language learner. All language tutors are professional teachers of Russian as a foreign language.   

Additional professional language development activities, such as the direct enrollment course and professional internship, enable students to develop language skills that will be particularly relevant in the sphere of their academic and professional interest. The program also offers the opportunity to refine conversational Russian abilities by pairing participants with language partners, who are most typically undergraduate students at KazNU from a variety of faculties. 

 

Flagship courses include:

  • Reading

  • Conversation Practice

  • Writing

  • Grammar

  • Intercultural Communication

  • Language of Media

  • Translation

  • Academic Presentation

  • Business Russian

  • Literature

  • Language of Film

Past direct enrollments include:

  • Macro-sociolinguistics 

  • Museum Exposition 

  • Translation and Comparative Linguistics 

  • History of Contemporary International Relations 

  • Foundations of Bio-nanotechnology 

  • Representations of International Conflicts in the Media 

  • Integrated Water Resource Managements and Sustainable Development 

  • Neurophysiology  

  • Theoretical Mechanics 

  • History of World Culture 

  • Technology of Translation of Special Texts 

  • Human Rights on the World Stage and in Kazakhstan 

  • Geographic Information Mapping and Design