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Helena Ples: "They Even Fall in Love"

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Helena Ples: "They Even Fall in Love"

30.09.2015

We met with Krakow Russian Centre Director and Pedagogical University of Krakow Professor Helena Ples at the IV European Student Festival, which recently concluded in the Bulgarian Black Sea resort of Kamchia. Helena Ples is already a regular at the festival; the student gathering was first held in Krakow.


Helena Ples

– You were at the very first of this series of international festivals for Russian-language students. This year's festival in Bulgaria was already your fourth. Do you accompany a new set of students each year?

– Yes. Each year we form a new team of students, although one of the guys on our team this year, Alexander Golembievsky, came with us to the festival last year. Although he's still a student, he now also works for the Russkiy Mir Foundation at our university.

– Here all the students have a chance to spend a whole week communicating with each other only in Russian. On a previous occasion, you spoke about the importance of these kinds of meetings. How will you systematise what the students have learnt now you're back in Poland?

– We'll get together and hold a meeting. The students will show each other the photographs and videos that they made at various events during the festival and will share experiences. We'll then compile all the material and use it to make a film about our trip, which we will present to all the Russian-language groups at the university. At the presentations the students who went to the festival will tell the others where we went and what we did, how well we did in the competitions. This way we not only systematise the new vocabulary learnt by the students who went to the festival, but we also begin to attract next year's cohort; many students want to sign up straight away for the upcoming festival after seeing the presentation.


Helena Ples leads a group at the Pedagogical University of Krakow.

– Do the students have to compete to get a place on the team?

– It was part of the founding conception behind the festival that those students who attend should have a minimum language level of B1-B2, which is already quite high; it means they should be able to hold a dialogue with each other and communicate. At the first festival there was even something of an unspoken rule that communication in English was forbidden. It was interesting to watch how students from different countries, say, a Polish student with a Czech student, or a Pole with a German, speak to each other in Russian and even correct each other's mistakes. They not only understand each other, but they correct each other's mistakes. OK, so they make many mistakes, but that's OK, they're turning on their brains and activating their knowledge. This is the key to learning to speak confidently in a difficult language such as Russian.

– Do the students usually stay in touch after the festival?

– We even had one case where a Polish student fell in love with a girl from Bulgaria and they're still together. Many students stay in touch over social networks, and even help each other with their studies. They often travel to each other's countries to meet; it's very easy to do that in Europe. Many of them decide to travel to Russia together, often to attend a language course together, or simply to see what it's like there with their own eyes, and not just rely on what Western mass media tell them.

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