Russian Film Lessons at Samara University Summer School

Sixty students from Poland, Great Britain and Taiwan took part in Samara University’s Russian Language and Culture short summer programme 2017.

A majority of the participants are philology students; many know Russian grammar well and speak fluent Russian. They made up an advance learners group which read classics (Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Bulgakov), learnt conversation and satire techniques, compared translated versions of Pushkin’s poems and watched Russian films. Learning through films helps memorise set phrases better, teachers said. Lessons for the beginners primarily focused on helping students overcome the language barrier with spoken Russian practice and short Russian film runs taking up much of the time.

Summer school students also practiced Russian during out-of-class communication with Russian Philology Department students. In their free time, they walked around the city to see local places of interests and joined the quest “Old Samara Riddles” at the end of the course. Samara University summer school has been popular with foreigners. The students who came to Samara for the summer programme for the second time have made considerable progress in Russian, University teachers said.