HSE University Hosts International Conference on Current Issues in Language Education
The HSE University School of Foreign Languages has held the second HSE LED Conference devoted to exchanging research and professional experience. Attendees included academics and teachers, experts and practitioners, language-education administrators and managers from various regions in Russia and abroad. The conference was held in person and online on December 8–9.
The name of the LED Conference stands for ‘Languages, Education, and Development,’ the three elements that form the basis of both the conference as a whole and its individual sections.
The opening of the conference took place at the HSE Cultural Centre and was also broadcast online. In her opening remarks, Ekaterina Kolesnikova, Head of the HSE University School of Foreign Languages, thanked the event’s speakers, partners, and participants for finding the time to join the discussion. ‘In addition to its unquestionable scientific value, the conference unites the academic community,’ she said. ‘We designed it to serve as an opportunity to meet and talk to colleagues with similar scientific and professional interests.’
The conference covered a wide range of pressing issues in language education related to linguistic studies, flexible education systems, modern textbooks and digital solutions for teaching foreign languages. Attendees travelled from various Russian cities and regions, including St Petersburg, Krasnodar, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Kaliningrad, as well as foreign counties such as Kazakhstan, Turkey, Thailand, Paraguay, and others.
A plenary session held on December 8 featured talks from five leading scientists: Galina Gumovskaya, Research Professor at the HSE University School of Foreign Languages; Vadim Andreev, Head of the HSE Centre for Digital Humanities; Elena Gritsenko, Head of the School of Foreign Languages at HSE University-Nizhny Novgorod; Liliya Komalova, Leading Researcher at INION RAN and Professor at MSLU; and Andrey Kolesnikov, Professor of the Institute of Foreign Languages at MCU.
The remainder of the conference featured sections with more than 150 reports delivered in Russian and English. Topics included the formation of flexible skills when teaching foreign languages to students, the integration of online services in learning materials, professional development for teachers of foreign languages, the digitalisation of training for the All-Russia Olympiad of School Students in English, pedagogical design and the development of English-taught electives, and language coaching for teaching adults.
On December 9, the conference hosted a presentation of the Linguatest foreign-language testing system, which was created at the HSE University School of Foreign languages and is designed to replace the international certifications formerly available in Russia.
The conference also featured an expert interview with Deputy First Vice Rector Elena Artyukhova devoted to the presentation of a modern model of professional development for university lecturers. The new model offers vertical career growth prospects for teaching methodologists and practitioners as an alternative to the traditional research trajectory.
Other events included a foresight discussion with business representatives in the field of educational technologies (on how reliable an investment foreign language studies are and whether there really is a return on investment from them), as well as a round table with representatives of schools. The round table presented practices for learning foreign languages and featured the participation of Irina Temnova of the Prosveshchenie publishing house.
The partners of the conference presented their own developments in a virtual co-working space where it was possible to communicate and analyse cases of the implementation of digital methodological solutions in the educational environment of organisations.