News from Yugra
Surgut –ELTA hosts the Festival of Hospitality
Ugra is a region of ethnic diversity, with a variety of languages, cultures and traditions. To celebrate this diversity UGRA-ELTA decided to organize "The Festival of Hospitality" within the international project “Big Read on the 60th Parallel” run in Surgut under the initiative of Yekaterina Genieva, director of Russian State Library of Foreign Literature. In 2009 our city read and discussed the works by Jack London. English language teachers took an active part in the project. This year the book for the reading and discussion is called “Domostroy”, the 16th century masterpiece of the Russian culture devoted to home and family traditions.
The Festival of Hospitality was held by the English Speaking Club, Faculty of Linguistics of Surgut State University and the members of Surgut-ELTA. The motto of the festival was the proverb: “East or West, home is best”. Pupils and students from schools and university represented different ethnic customs and traditions of hospitality. At first we “travelled” to the eastern countries: India, Tadjikistan, Kazakhstan, Bashkortostan and Tatarstan. Among the western countries there were the USA, Scotland, Italy, Greece and France. Our wonderful voyage was full of interesting presentations, songs and dances and it ended with home traditions of the Russians and the Khanty and a great feast with plenty of tasty things like scones, chuck-chuk, pizza, plov, samsa and others. While discovering traditions of other countries the students learn to be tolerant. As one of the oldest traditions of hospitality says: People who share their bread or food sitting at the table, will never be enemies. May there always be peace and understanding!
Some Glimpses of the First Yugra-ELTA’s Year.
The first Association’s year was rather fruitful and successful. Here are some highlights of the first year :
- on January 22, 2010 – Yugra -ELTA was founded, on February 6-9, 2010 – Surgut-ELTA was founded.
- In March a conference in Surgut Teacher Training University and an ELT seminar at school #46 were held.
- In April we had an English Open Doors Class “Culture Crossroads” in Surgut State University and The Round Table Discussion and PowerPoint Presentations Festival “The Price of the Great Victory”.
- On May 28-29, 2010 we ran our first International conference “Modern Approaches to Teaching Foreign Languages” with the key speakers Chris Istrai and Vino Reardon.
- Some good news came from the annual City contest “The Teacher of the Year -2010” when Yugra-ELTA member Natalia Aksakova won the first prize.
- The biggest event of the year was the International conference “Foreign Languages today -2010: Tendencies and Perspectives in Russian Education” held on November 29 – December 1, 2010 with more than 350 participants from 5 countries. The key speakers of the conference were some great specialists like Susan Barduhn, Rafel Naseer and Ken Martinez (the USA), Elena Lubnina, Elena Solovova, Lyudmila Gorodetskaya, Svetlana Titova and Andrey Chuzhakin (Moscow), Mikhail Brodsky and Anatoly Chudinov ( Yekaterinburg).
- The year of 2011 seems to be promising too. On January 26th we opened The Teacher English Club “Chatterbox” at the pub “People”.
- On February 9, 2011 – Surgut-ELTA celebrated the first anniversary and had a birthday Party with a big ABC cake.
- In April we are going to have Surgut English Fairytales Festival and other interesting events. That wonderful feeling of being a part of the great NATE family gives us some new impulses.
Olga Simonova
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