Visit of Dr. Julia Lazarus, Deputy Head of the Languages Department FAN, SZ, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

During the week May 21 - May 25, the Center of Russian as a Foreign Language welcomed Dr. Julia Lazarus, Deputy Head of the Languages Department FAN, SZ, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Dr. Lazarus is a specialist in teaching Russian to German students, and with her broad experience of working in classes of heritage speakers, Dr. Lazarus (in cooperation with a colleague) is currently working on a new guide to writing for heritage speakers of Russian whose main language is German.

On May 22, Dr. Lazarus gave a master-class 'Teaching Russian to heritage speakers in Germany: approaches, methodology, selection of materials'. At the working meeting with the team working on the Russian Learner Corpus, Dr. Lazarus was able to familiarize herself with both the functional aspects of the corpus and the research and educational resources that the corpus provides to linguists and teachers. The Russian and German colleagues agreed on joint work on the corpus.

Dr. Lazarus visited classes of Russian as a foreign language of different levels, met with language instructors at the Center, and also with representatives of HSE Faculty of Economics which has active student exchanges with Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. The visit is a part of Erasmus+ staff exchange between the two partner universities. Earlier, in the end of April, Olga S. Eremina, the Director of Center of Russian as a Foreign Language visited Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg; met with Vera Kolbina, the Head of the Department of North-East and rarely taught languages at the Language Center of FAU; and with Dr. Mario Oesterreicher, the Head of the Languages Department FAN, SZ. As part of her visit, Olga Eremina participated in a series of project meetings with the Russian language specialists from different universities in Bavaria, and gave a presentation about Russian at HSE for the participants of the course 'Business Russian', level B2.

Both Russian and German specialists are very interested in an intensive future collaboration in such areas as teaching Russian abroad, student exchanges, organizing summer and winter language schools, joint publications, etc.