DEPARTMENT OF HUMANITIES

The Department of Humanities was established in 1973 with the opening of the preparatory faculty for foreign citizens of the Kharkіv Polytechnic Institute. The main purpose of its activities is to prepare foreign students for study at universities of Ukraine in Ukrainian and English. The department trains engineering students for technical universities of our country, prepares future medical students and future economists to study in their first-year at university, and teach trainees (philologists and non-philologists) from Western Europe and the USA. Such a wide range of activities is due to the social order and the needs of students in the current educational market.The founder of the Department and its first Head was Associate Professor E.P. Alexandrova. At various times, the Department was headed by a senior teacher Zh.S. Udachina, Associate Professor V.E. Shtylenko, Associate Professor S.P. Oleinik, Professor T.A. Snegurova. At present the Department is headed by Associate Professor N.V. Severyn. The scientific potential of the Department is high. There are  3 associate professors – N.V. Severyn, Yu.A. Romanov, T.E. Sukhanova; 6 senior teachers –  E.V. Krivolapova, V.Yu. Paramonova, T.N. Sedoykina, A.Yu. Dmytryk, M.P. Myroshnychenko,  N. A. Kartun; 1 teacher – M.E. Shelestina. All of them make a great contribution to the upbringing and education of foreign students. Over the years, teachers of the Department worked at universities of Austria, Spain, Sweden, China, Mongolia, Syria, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Madagascar and other countries, and lectured at the University of Vienna, Innsbruck and Klagenfurt.The Department pays great attention to providing the educational process with study guides, textbooks and dictionaries. Textbooks and study guides created at the department are basic in working with foreign citizens and have received positive feedback from many universities in Ukraine, the CIS countries, and also abroad – Austria, Germany, and the USA. They are the textbooks on the Russian language “Beginning” in 4 volumes (by N.I Nagaytseva, T.A Snegurova, E.A. Kropotova, and others), “Have a good journey!” (by Yu.A. Romanov, V .V. Dubichinsky, S. Laudin), “Debut” (by T.A Snegurova, Yu.A. Romanov, V.Yu. Paramonova). The Department prepared 4 distance courses, a series of textbooks on scientific speech for future engineers, medical students, economics, as well as multilingual dictionaries. The Department of Humanities is actively cooperating with fellow teachers from different countries. Thus, colleagues from the Humboldt University (Dr. S. Laudin), the Vienna University of Business and Management (Master S. Kahn), and the University of Klagenfurt (Professor T. Reuter) are involved in the preparation of joint teaching materials. The scientific work of the Department is carried out in accordance with the Department subject “Optimization of the forms and methods of forming the language competence of foreign students of the Faculty of International Education”. Professors and associate professors of the Department are the authors of 4 monographs, which study the actual problems of linguistics, philosophy, pedagogy. Teachers take part in the work of scientific and methodological seminars organized in NTU “KPI” and in other universities, make presentations at conferences at various levels, publish scientific articles in specialized publications which are indexed in the international scientometric database “Scopus” and “Web of Science”, in the international scientometric database for social and human sciences “Copernicus”, review scientific papers and dissertation research, and are members of the organizing committees of conferences. The specificity of the work of the Department is clearly manifested in the aspect of its international relations. Over the years, the Department teaches trainees from the USA, Germany, Austria, Great Britain, Greece, Spain, Italy, Korea, and other countries. For more than 20 years, the summer language school within the framework of the Treaty of NTU “KPI” with the Institute of Slavic Studies at the University of Klagenfurt worked at our Department. The Department also organized summer language courses with the University of Aizenstadt (Austria), the University of Ayova (USA), and Istanbul Aydin University (Turkey).The Department of Humanities pays special attention to the leisure time of foreign students: give tours around the city, the ecopark, organizes visiting theaters, museums, exhibitions; together with the Department of Physical Education organizes sports competitions among foreign students. The tradition of the Department is preparation and holding of student concerts at which foreign students demonstrate not only the knowledge of Ukrainian and English, but also their talents.