Chinese-oriented Russian Language Online Classes: What We Learned from the Pandemic

This research aims at exploring peculiarities of Chinese students in online classes of Russian language and drawing conclusions about linguo-cultural inclusion which might be useful for practitioners teaching foreign languages online to students based in the People's Republic of China. Since the ongoing pandemic raises questions over the role of electronic devices and the way to make a proper use of them, university practitioners should take account of the experience acquired through the last academic year in order to be prepared to adapt their teaching method to students who may be attending lessons from other countries. This finds application on the students enrolled in a foreign university who attended online classes from their country because of travel restrictions. At the People's Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University) most of foreign students come from the People's Republic of China. The students involved in this research attended the same classes as their Russian-speaking colleagues and were required to study Russian language as an additional subject. Descriptive data analysis is supported by a one-year teaching experience over a focus group (N= 32) of first-year fully online students based in China, who at the end of the academic year were willing to share their opinion about some key issues of Russian language online classes. © 2021 IEEE.