EDUCATION

Language Learning Popular as Ever

The thirst for learning English and other foreign languages continues as Russians travel more and seek international business partners.

By Ali Nassor

Special to The St. Petersburg Times

For The St. Petersburg Times Many adults are heading back to school to increase their career potential and make traveling abroad less difficult by mastering foreign languages.

When Russia opened its doors to the market economy about one and half decades ago, it took people off-guard and ill-equipped to meet the challenges of a culturally and technologically diversified world. It was a puzzle to the outgoing Iron Curtain generation whose commercial lexicon went no further than that of a centralized planned economy based on the communist ideological doctrine.

But since communism was no more and the former Soviet satellite states had shunned Russian as their medium of communication, it marked the dawn of a new era and the birth of a new breed of Russians who would adapt themselves to the changing business environment. They needed a new language to win the confidence of the outside business world where Russian was no more than the language of a die-hard communist.

Now, 16 years later, “a job seeker’s resume in the business sector faces a high risk of being dumped in the dustbin if it lacks a foreign language,” says Christina Shklyar, director of the St. Petersburg-based Best Teach language center. “In the eyes of an employer, a job seeker who speaks at least one foreign language, especially English, is better than two who speak none,” says Shklyar, whose school has an average of 2,000 students learning English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Finnish.

“Though we don’t look down upon other disciplines, English remains a priority, as about 90 percent of our trainees specialize in the language,” she says. Hers is one among more than a thousand privately owned language schools that mushroomed following Russia’s entry into the market economy.

Best Teach, currently one of the city’s largest language centers, boasting 30 classrooms in its three branches and a wide network of off-house training has survived hundreds of others “that weathered away, mainly due to wrong strategies” according to Shklyar.

“As an example of the right strategy, you may look at our location... doesn’t it make our clientele immune to bad weather and from the troubles of parking their cars?” she asks, referring to the school’s main campus on the fourth-floor of the city’s largest department store, Gostiny Dvor, where it can be reached by metro commuters without having to go outside. There is also a large free parking lot in the store’s courtyard. “The school’s other two premises are just a stone’s throw from metro stations in the city center,” Shklyar adds.

“We noted the multinational diversity of foreign companies operating in the city about 10 years ago, and extended our curriculum to include languages other than English,” says Shklyar, explaining the tactic behind attracting corporate students, who account for 70 percent of the center’s clientele.

Shklyar also believes that the schools that did not last for long were unsuccessful because they wanted to get rich quickly, saying they charged unaffordable prices for services they could not offer at a time when the general public could hardly afford their daily bread.

“Even now, when both living standards and operational costs are higher than ever before, I think the 15,000 rubles we charge for a three-and-a-half month term of 102 academic hours are among the lowest in the city,” she says of group tuition fees, which are slightly lower than corporate prices.

A graduate of the State Pedagogical University in Penza who majored in English and German, Shklyar knows how to equip her family business with appropriate staff, which consists of 90 professional teachers, including 20 native speakers of English.

But the institution she runs is also a project for life, as she puts it. She says it was a bitter experience for her having to deal with more than a dozen cases where elderly women were ready to pay a fortune for beginners’ English classes so that they could serve as baby sitters during their grandchildren’s holidays abroad.

A sign of the times we live in, she says.

But Yury Brandin, a founder and marketing director of one of St. Petersburg’s leading language centers boasting Western-style hi-tech sophistication and a predominantly expatriate team of English teachers, followed a rather different path to reach the standard of which he is now proud.

To bring the Orange Language Center to the popularity peak it currently enjoys, Brandin had to open a window on the West. He conducted a survey on the ways in which countries like Poland and the former Czechoslovakia with similar socio-economic histories to Russia’s had managed to overcome the language barrier and smoothly integrate into the world trading system.

His endeavor was also eased by the World Trade Organization’s globalization policies; and later, by the growing wallets of ordinary Russians, who began to view commodities and services that were once regarded as optional luxuries as necessities.

Brandin was inspired to establish the language center five years ago, and has become the talk of the town of late thanks to his skills in forging a marriage between promotional techniques borrowed from the West and prevailing dynamics on the local market.

As a result of these policies, among others, the number of students at Orange “tripled to around 500 in the two and a half years since we moved to this location,” said Brandin. The school moved to 140 Nevsky Prospekt, close to Ploshchad Vosstaniya metro station in fall 2005.

The center currently houses eight classrooms, each with a 10 student-capacity on its first floor, and is currently awaiting the construction of another eight classrooms on the second floor which are expected to open later in the year.

The center’s students, who also include teenagers and the elderly studying both on an individual and group basis, are mostly from corporate organizations and pay an average of 200 rubles (which can vary depending on whether the teacher is a native speaker or Russian) per academic hour in a semester of 120 hours.

The academic year comprises of two semesters — from January to May, and from September until December.

However, the number of permanent students does not include 260 children enrolled on the Center’s “Children’s Language Summer and Winter Camps” in the Leningrad Oblast, where they learn English via the medium of drama, games, sports and other entertainment run by native speakers.

Brandin’s determination to raise academic standards to an international level led him to recruit native English teachers directly from their homelands. As the result of an intensive search for highly qualified language teachers, Orange Language Center’s staff currently includes 15 qualified native English teachers who came to Russia on a working contract in addition to another 10 qualified local instructors.

Daniel Jakubowsky, 26, is one of the expatriate teachers at the center. He came to Russia from the U.S. three years ago on an English language teaching contract after graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee where he studied Russian.

“I’m planning to extend my contract for at least one more year because I like it here,” he says, adding that “the working atmosphere is friendly, and I don’t feel like I’m subordinate to someone else.”

“It’s quite a big contrast with the place I worked in before coming here,” he says. Jakubowsky worked for Language Link before moving to Orange.

If Brandin was motivated by prevailing world social and economic trends, it was a quest for independence and freedom that inspired Yelena Yarovaya to launch the EgoRound Intercultural Communication Center in 1994, which was then called “Eurocollege.”

“I didn’t want to enslave myself working for the state, which seemed to have nothing to offer in the early 1990s,” says Yarovaya, a graduate of the St. Petersburg State Pedagogical Institute where she studied Philology and Psychology.

She and four other female graduates rented a room at the St. Petersburg State Technological Institute to teach English to a group of 15 private students.

She took the school through the turbulent times of the last decade, surviving the August 1998 financial crisis that buried hundreds of the city’s business enterprises, to emerge as a stronger and popular institution with a promising bright future.

Yarovaya believes the secrets of her success lie in her ability to combine her language skills and psychological expertise, along with her innovative instincts which have yielded new projects in the long run.

She is respected by the corporate and individual students under her patronage for masterminding a project envied by others and from which the city administration has taken a leaf to implement its program on tolerance.

The Cross-Cultural program she has masterminded as part of the center’s curriculum is based on the methodology of teaching a language as a business medium and as a means of understanding and tolerating the cultures and values of the native speakers of the language.

EgoRound charges 1,500 rubles per two academic hours for corporate clients following an 80-hour course.

According to Yarovaya, corporate clients from more than a dozen companies including Toyota, Elcoteq electronics and Oil Terminal account for 70 percent of the center’s clientele, which has prompted the center to rent additional space in business centers.

“There are prices to suit everybody,” responds Yerovaya to a question about prices for groups and individuals, saying, “It’s much lower than corporate prices, depending on the duration and intensity of the course, the requirements of a client and whether the client is an in-house or out-house student.”

EgoRound’s center at 57 Ligovsky Prospekt houses four 8-people capacity classrooms and offices. Its staff consists of 20 teachers, including five native English speakers.

However, cross-culture is “not only about Russians learning about other people and their languages, but also about other people learning our language and our values,” says Tatyana Korepanova, a Russian language teacher for foreigners at Language Studio, one of the city’s multi-profile language centers.

Korepanova, a professional Russian-language teacher, says she has noticed an ever-increasing interest in learning Russian language and literature among foreigners during her three years working at the center.

At Language Studio’s two branches in the city center, Korepanova has taught dozens of top managers from companies including Gillette, Lenta, Ursa and even Gazprom, as well as students from Britain and tourists interested in Russian literature who follow a variety of courses ranging from three to nine months.

More stories by this section:

Students Spread Their Wings | Counting Costs And Payback | Finding Your Perfect Match | State Business School Looks to Future | Choosing the Right MBA Program | Collectivism Versus Individualism | Harrow Beckons | Education News | Giving Children the Gift of Languages

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