AREAS OF SOCIAL-PEDAGOGICAL SUPPORT OF MIGRANT STUDENTS DURING THEIR ADAPTATION PERIOD IN ENGLISH CLASS

The objective of the paper is to analyze challenges that migrant students face and describe the areas of their social-cultural support in English class.

While adapting to new social-cultural conditions migrant students have to overcome a range of obstacles. The most urgent of them are language and social-cultural barriers which prevent foreign students from their successful involvement in educational, leisure and social activities.

The problem becomes even worse when social-psychological adaptation to new life conditions is combined with academic adaptation. In other words, we observe here a big gap between migrant students’ level of communicative competence in obtaining education information and university high requirements as well as their unawareness of academic stereotypes of the host country.

The social-cultural barrier is determined by their ignorance of norms and basic values of contemporary Russian society, features of everyday life and rules of communication. This causes difficulty in interacting with both fellow-students and teachers.

Social-pedagogical support of foreign students demands teachers to organize their work in several areas. First of all, teachers should undergo appropriate methodical training to be ready to teach migrant students. Secondly, teachers should work out and introduce new information in English in the proper way. They are also responsible for selecting culturally-oriented materials and for creating learning tasks that introduce a multicultural world.

Besides, support of foreign students in the class also involves the active use of interactive forms of education (e.g., encouragement of teamwork between Russian and migrant students in the preparation of joint projects and presentations) and the use of variability principle.