Content and Language Integrated Learning: Potential and Obstacles of Its Implementation in Russia

Abstract

Reforms and initiatives applied to the field of Russian higher education during the past decade focus particularly on extending the scope of communicative educational space and scientific fields integration. Consequently, linguistic competence contributing to significant acceleration of the processes of globalization and internationalization of the society as a whole becomes the key component of higher professional education. It is necessary to ascertain that the current system of language education in Russian universities fails to deal with the tasks in hand comprehensively. The search for more efficient didactical tools and ways of organizing teaching processes culminated in choosing the paradigm of integrated education, specifically, integration of subject knowledge and foreign language. This approach is well-renowned in scientific and educational literature as CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning).
The major objective of the present article is to analyze the current attempts of implementing CLIL in Russian Universities through the example of Tomsk Polytechnic University. The analysis comprises the effectiveness of CLIL didactic capacity, the prerequisites for its emergence as well as needs and challenges in the system of Russian higher education and intellectual labor market. As a conclusion, we offer a systematic list of measures that tend to improve the situation.