arly adaptation stage for foreign students: objectives and approaches

Adaptation of foreign students to new sociocultural and educational environment becomes an acute issue for growing internationalization of Russian education. It is necessary to design adaptation study materials to accelerate and facilitate the early adaptation on university foundation programs. The adaptation materials are arranged as a student guide combining informational and study materials. The research employs the qualitative method and the method of interviews. Material selection is based on the principles of necessity and minimization. The paper proves three essential parts of the adaptation student guide: the university, the foundation department and the city where students live. Each part approaches certain adaptation problems. The information about the university serves for both adaptation and career guidance of foreign students. The part about the foundation department includes all university structural units and services which foreign students may interact with. This part adds phrase units to information materials. Phrase units are designed on the basis of interviews with employees of corresponding services, and embrace typical situations and questions which foreign student may address to employees. The choice of phrases implies principles of syntactic stereotype and lexical minimization. The part about the city includes phrase units as well and focuses on the social infrastructure of the city as the latter is more acute for foreign students. The results of the research may be used for creating similar adaptation guidebooks for any Russian university and abroad to deal with issues of early
adaptation period.