History

The team of foreign language teachers have worked at the department of the International Business Activity since its establishment in 1994. The foreign language instructors have been teaching languages to the students majoring in international economics and international business activity. According to the National standards of professional training programs for bachelors, specialists and masters,  educational qualification characteristics and due to the growing interest among students towards foreign language learning for their professional activity there was taken a decision to create a department of foreign languages for professional communication, which was officially established on January 1, 2003.

Mission

Being aware of the growing demand on experts capable to effectively operate and communicate under modern conditions of globalization and integration and aiming at popularizing and teaching foreign languages as a tool of mastering the professional profile in accordance with the requirements of the Council of Europe and  international standards, the staff of the department in their teaching and research activities are guided by the principles of total quality management in education, namely by creating synergistic partnership relations among students and teachers, constant self-improvement and self-evaluation, improvement of the teaching/learning process by means of developing students’ communicative and leadership skills, their independent learning skills, teamwork skills and critical thinking skills. 

The priority of the students’ professional needs determined the faculty’s focus on communicative language teaching, project-centered and content-oriented language instruction in close cooperation with special subjects’ lecturers taking into account various levels of language proficiency – from elementary to advanced.

Staff

There are 14 instructors in the department staff. The head of the department is Nataliya Todorova, associate professor, PhD (Philology). The English Language section, headed by the senior teaching fellow Lydia Levenets, staffs the senior teaching fellow Inna Yegorova, the assistants: Anna Glebova, Alina Karapetyan, Olga Mazzur, Anna Piskurskaya, Eugenia Pronoza, Yelena Starodubtseva, and Larysa Cherner. The German Language section numbers three teachers: the head of the section, senior teaching fellow Viktoriya Vitkovskaya, assistants Nataliya Golovko and Nataliya Pshenichnaya. The French language section staffs assistants Lilia Postnikova and Tatiana Kornilova. The senior secretary of the department is Yelena Solovianova, the secretary is Viktoria Serdechnaya.

Training Programs

Jointly with the International Business department the department of foreign languages for professional communication enrolls students for the English, German and French programs with majors on «international economics» and «international business activity», where a number of special subjects are delivered in a foreign language and the main foreign language is taught on the advanced level. The curricula of these programs are adapted to those of our Western partner universities. The students of these programs are taught by the foreign visiting professors and by Ukrainian lecturers specially qualified abroad. The students get the opportunity of exchange studies in our foreign partner universities – Utrecht (the Netherlands), Magdeburg (Germany), Grenoble (France) - and in other Western higher schools. At the end of the course, having passed the Foreign Language State Exam and having written and defended the graduation thesis in a foreign language, the participants of the program are granted a certificate proving their level of proficiency on the main foreign language. 

Courses

The following courses are taught by us:

Foreign language cycle:

1. English
2. Business English (intermediate to upper-intermediate)
3. Business English (advanced)
4. English as a second foreign language
5. German as a second foreign language
6. Business German
7. French as a second foreign language
8. Commercial French

Professional communication cycle (in English, German, and French):

1. Business Communication
2. Communication Training
3. Practice in economic translation
4. Cross-cultural Management (in English)

                The content of the courses taught is adapted to the requirements of the international foreign language exams such as BEC, TOEFL, FCE, IELTS, GRE, GMAT, DSH, DELF

Projects

The staff of the department have developed the unique teaching techniques in teaching foreign languages for professional communication, which take into account the most modern domestic and foreign achievements. The main research interests of the teachers lie in the field of the project-oriented language instruction, principles of total quality management as applied to the language teaching and learning, interactive teaching, mastering the modern strategies of language instruction in the multi-modal and multi-media context.

Since December 2002 the department has participated in the joint project of Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine and British Council on National ESP curriculum development for non-language universities. Now the new Curriculum is being piloted together with the European Language Portfolio for Economists.

The German language teachers closely cooperate with the Language center of Otto-von-Guericke University (Magdeburg, Germany) on material development and computer-assisted language learning.

The cooperation with the teachers of English Program at the Faculty of Economics and Management, Otto-von-Guericke University (Magdeburg, Germany) gave a stimulus to developing a joint German-Ukrainian training web-based seminar “Cross-border Management and Communication: German-Ukrainian Perspectives”. The seminar implies joint virtual cooperation of the international students teams and ends with web-presentation of the students’ research.

A lot of work is being done on updating and improving the on-line training web-sites on the courses  «Business Communication in English», «Cross-cultural Management» and «Communication Training».

The teachers of the department are actively executing the international TASIS project “European Studies” with the universities of France, Belgium, Finland and Spain.    

Partners

• Department of English for Economic Studies, Donetsk National University
• Department of Foreign Languages, National Mining Academy, Dnipropertovsk
• Department of International Management, Faculty of Economics and Management, Otto-von-Guericke University (Magdeburg, Germany)
• The Language Teaching Center, Otto-von-Guericke University (Magdeburg, Germany)
• Faculty of Economics and Management, the Higher School of Utrecht (the Netherlands)

Contact Information

Artem Str., 96, office 112, Donetsk, 83000 Ukraine

Tel. (+380 62) 304-2168 

e-mail: [email protected]