QUERY: Spets(ial'nyye )kursy

[Maria Dmytriyeva]

first of all, some comments on traditional organization of higher education in post-Soviet countries.
there is no such thing as major and minor.
if you apply for some speciality in physics -- physics is what you will get by your graduation.
besides theoretical, practical and specialized courses all students have classes in some more general areas. like phylosophy, political science, psychology, environment studies. 

so, to put it all in places let us consider an example from my education.
I went to the Volyn State University. it is a traditional teaching university (as our research institutions do not teach undergraduates)
our faculty (mind the term) of foreign languages had departments of English, German, and Applied linguistics.my department was that of Applied linguistics.
everybody in English and AL had courses in English morphology, syntal, phonetics, translation theory and practice (this one was my favourite), teaching methods and such. these were major courses.
then every department had a set of department specific courses -- these were British and American litreature for English department (and teaching practice of which we were spared) and AL had several large courses in linguitics, like theory, history, methods, and several large courses on computer science.

specialized courses were dedicated to some specific subareas -- like computer-mediated tranlsation, or methodology of dictionary compiling, or structural description of Ukrainian. sometimes these courses are crash-taught by an invited professor from another university -- say, 3 classes every day for 3 days in a row. 

when I went to school (these were the years 1992-1997) we had few electives and these were traditionally the specialized courses but not always. I have no idea though how it is organized now. 

With best regards,
Maria


> Would the Russian academics be so kind as to explain this in terms that 
> an American academic would understand?

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