From 28 September to 5 October, Deborah Schechter, a lecturer at Tel Aviv University (Israel), was on an official visit to Kazan Federal University.

Tel Aviv University (TAU) is Israel's largest and most comprehensive institution of higher learning, with over 30,000 students studying across nine faculties, 29 schools and 98 departments.

World Rankings:

TAU is a Reuters “Top 100 Innovation University”.

TAU ranks 26th in the world for citation impact per faculty member in the 2017 QS rankings. According to "US World News Report," citations per faculty are the best understood and most widely accepted measure of research strength and faculty productivity at a university.

TAU is in 75th place in the world, and leads Israel in both the number of research publications and the number of publications in the most prestigious journals according to the 2017 Leiden Ranking, another objective measure of research strength and standing.

TAU ranks 5th in winning European Research Council (ERC) grants among 172 leading European research institutions.

This is the second visit of Deborah Schechter to our capital, which, by the way, overwhelms our guest with its hospitality and historical grandeur with every new visit again and again.

Deborah Schechter held a series of lectures and seminars for undergraduate students enrolled in the program "Teaching English in Secondary and High school." Since these classes were open for everyone, they were attended by students and teachers of KFU who were interested in them.

The topics that our foreign colleague offered to the students were devoted to the technologies and methods of teaching foreign languages:

♦ Writing multiple choice test questions: principles and implementations

♦ Alternative methods for teaching grammar: integrating reading and film

♦ CEFR aligned course syllabus and course site design on MOODLE

♦ Positive affect for effective learning: the role of the teacher.

The students not only acquired a huge amount of special information on the declared subject, but also received a lot of advice on how to become a successful teacher. The lecturer literally “charged” everyone with her enthusiasm and dedication to the profession of a teacher. Especially the attendees got interested in the methods of assessing the level of knowledge and principles of tests compilation as ways of assessing language and speech competencies of the students.

We consider Deborah Schechter's visits to Kazan University quite fruitful: for example, in 2017 two collaborative scientific articles of the teachers of the Department of educational technologies and information systems in Philology were published and indexed in the WoS database. In 2019, our guest will take part in the XVIII International conference "Language Taste of the Era". We hope that this cooperation will continue and take new forms.