9 The place of English in the Russian higher education landscape (original) (raw)
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This article discusses the World Englishes (WE) paradigm state of the art in Russia. The author argues that the WE ideas are to find their way to the minds of Russian linguists and educators. There is practical need for communicating with non-native speakers through English, which raises questions of the so called intermediary translation. This practical need will result in accepting Russia English identity required for spreading information about Russian culture in the world. In Russia, English is the major foreign language at school and is considered to be a language for intercultural and international business communication. Its domestic functions are limited to some pragmatic usage and education. The pragmatic usage of English is mostly observed in advertising, as English-flavored trade names are associated with prestige and good quality and thus attract customers. English is an education discipline to study at a secondary and tertiary school, though more and more elementary schools and even kindergartens introduce English classes in their curricula. University English majors can use the language as a tool of instruction, which is not mandatory and depends on school requirements. English for non-majors is learned as an academic discipline, with the focus on developing students' communicative competences and ability to read professional literature. There are mass media in English (for example, the Moscow Times, St. Petersburg Times, Vladivostok Times, Sakhalin Independent, and other newspapers, as well as magazines, some journals, and a TV channel); however, they are not generally addressed to the Russian readership but are intended for international businessmen, tourists, and other guests. Scholarly works are rarely published in English since the requirements for dissertations and a number of Russian grant-supported projects are that the results of research be published in Russian, which leads to a certain contradiction: Russian scholars want to be known abroad but they have to write their works in Russian, known to a comparatively limited academic circle in the world, rather than in English, the global language of intercultural communication. Though restricted to international usage, English is indispensable for the purposes of intercultural communication where it dominates over other languages, even native languages of communicators. Thus, for example, Chinese-Russian or Japanese-Russian negotiations are not infrequently conducted in English, which is labeled as a lingua franca, or ELF (Jenkins, 2003, 2004-2005). This type of communication faces a number of challenges if communicators, each speaking his or her local variety of English, have strong accents and rely on their own pragmatic rules of communication. This situation has necessitated Russian scholars' embarking on the intensive study of World Englishes (WE) and intercultural communication which began not long ago. In this article, I am going to outline the main directions of this research and its practical output for the so-called intermediary translation, i.e. translation from English as a Lingua Franca, as well as to describe the main effects of English and Russian interaction, resulting in nativization of English in Russia and Englishization of Russian.