All our courses are based on communicative approaches and combine learning common expressions used in everyday situations with thorough and systematic grammatical approach. This is of vital importance for learning a language like Russian, which has an inflectional system and a non-fixed word order – a language in which word endings or word’s place create the meaning.
Conversational topics are given with appropriate grammar structures, while the grammar part of the course proceeds gradually from simple “basic concepts” to more complex issues in a psychologically proven order (e.g. naming objects – describing locations – actions with objects – moving to and from, etc.). One of our most important principles consists in giving our students the linguistic means to express themselves in everyday situations by constant training of communicative skills and models, which allows learners to reach their own communicative objectives.
For beginners, we use our own course book Poehali, which has been tested and used in the school for over three years. During this period feedback from teachers and students has been analysed and many changes have been made. Poehali is a joint project of Liden & Denz and Zlatoust , a leading publishers in the field of Russian as a Foreign Language.
Maria Gardzish is the director of studies at our St.Petersburg centre. She has a masters degree in Teaching Russian as a Foreign Language from St.Petersburg State University and worked as a teacher for Liden & Denz since 2004. She was promoted to assistant director of studies in 2006 and to director of studies in 2007.
All our teachers are native speakers and hold a university degree either in Teaching Russian as a Foreign Language (RKI) or Linguistics. We encourage our teachers to learn new languages, because we believe that having this experience as students is a valuable source for further improvement of their professional skills.
Our teachers apply a variety of techniques ranging from introduction to the Russian language history, from etymology and comparative linguistics to role-play, live discussions and creative work (drawing, story telling) in the class.
Teacher training sessions take place on a regular basis. In a team work they share their experience, discuss the problems they recently solved, new methods and techniques they implemented and evaluate new teaching materials.
