EFL Teaching in the Ukraine: State Regulated or Commercial?

Abstract

English and the learning of English in the Ukraine owe their current popularity to a number of economic, political, social, cultural, and psychological factors. They include, for instance, the emergence of a whole new class of businessmen striving to establish ties with foreign partners, attempts by state-owned and private firms and enterprises to integrate themselves into the international economy, and the intentions of many people to travel to developed Western countries or even to try to settle there for good because of the current severe crisis in the Ukraine. Numerous other reasons can be given, all of them demonstrating that the individual plans of quite a number of Ukrainian citizens depend on their mastering English. Governmental language planning and policy are in principle favorable to satisfying this need, consistent with Cooper (1989), Tollefson (1995), and other modern authors who see language policy as indivisibly linked to the distribution of political power and economic resources. The Ukrainian authorities set the integration of the country into the world community and the international economy as one of their primary tasks in protecting and developing an independent Ukraine. Such a goal is impossible without many people who have a good mastery of foreign languages (FLs), especially English. The authorities' ever-increasing attention to the teaching and learning of foreign languages (EFL in particular) is evident in some recent documents regulating the functioning of state-owned educational institutions. For instance, the state national program for educational reform (Ukraine of the 21st Century), approved by the cabinet ministers in 1993, outlines new standards for the teaching of basic academic subjects. FLs are included in the basic subject list. According to a 1994 regulation of the Ministry of Education, in institutions of higher learning all academic subjects taught are divided into normative and optional. The normative subjects enumerated in the