University lecture: experience of teaching chemistry to foreign students

Abstract

The article presents the experience of teaching chemistry to foreign students of a medical university. To facilitate the understanding of educational material in chemistry by foreign students, the didactic potential of university lectures has been expanded. Every year, Russian universities accept citizens from more than 170 countries to study. The annual growth in the number of foreign students corresponds to the national course for further integration into the educational and scientific community of the allied states. The relevance of the study is determined by the need of Russian universities to develop educational and methodological materials in a foreign language for training programs for foreign students. The aim of this study is to facilitate the understanding of lecture material, and, as a result, to increase the effectiveness of teaching chemistry to foreign students of a medical university through the use of an English-language course of lectures in the learning process. Within this work, using the method of students questionnaire survey, a pedagogical study of the attitude of foreign students to the use of a course of chemistry lectures in English was carried out. The study involved 80 foreign students of Altai State Medical University, citizens of far abroad countries. It was found that the described course of lectures minimizes the difficulties of foreign students' perception of large amounts of educational material (97.5% of respondents), increases the efficiency of independent work (92.5%), helps to overcome the language barrier when teaching in an intermediary language (67.5%), as a result, there is a general interest of foreign students in chemistry as a science (95%), facilitating of educational material understanding and an increase in academic performance (96.2% of those who successfully passed the exam in chemistry compared to 60% of students in the control group). Thus, we came to the conclusion that the use of a developed English-language course of lectures in the teaching chemistry makes it easier for students to perceive the lecture material and improve the quality of chemistry education for foreign students.