PROFESSIONAL LINGUISTIC EDUCATION AT MASTER'S DEGREE COURSES: CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS

The article provides an insight into the peculiarities of the Master's degree courses in Linguistics major. The fundamental change in the system of university education, which led to its division into two stages, those of Bachelor's and Master's levels, influenced the way students plan their career in Russia. The introduction of Master's degree courses has become crucial for higher educational institutions and required generating universal requirements for applicants, creating innovative curriculums, developing new academic disciplines, defining approaches and formulating principles of teaching, corresponding to the students' career needs. The paper is aimed at the description and analysis of four programmes that have been successfully introduced at the Higher School of Foreign Languages and Translation Studies, Kazan Federal University, Russian Federation. The current programmes allow graduates to specialize in the following professional fields: Theory of Translation, Intercultural and Interlingual Communication; Teaching Foreign Languages in the Multicultural Environment: Innovative Approaches and Technologies, Theory and Methods of Teaching Foreign Languages and Cultures; Management in Linguistic Education - all within the framework of the foreign languages they learn. The authors present their findings on the specifics of teaching linguistic disciplines at the second stage of professional university education. The practical value of the research is in an effort to facilitate teaching and learning process in terms of selecting course materials and educational technology, assessing student's performance and learning outcome. The research data accumulated with the help of conventional research methods of observation, interview, product analysis and questionnaire have given the authors an opportunity to come to a number of conclusions. The most significant of them is that the Master's degree courses in Linguistics major have become not only a way of building the profound linguistic professional background and developing a multi-sided professional personality, but also a way of changing a profession. The authors highlight considerable advantages and minor drawbacks of the two-stage system of linguistic education. Furthermore, the authors' views are supported unreservedly by the results of the students' opinion survey targeted at finding out their professional background, ways of adaptation to the new academic environment, current challenges and needs, expectations, career plans, motivation factors, as referred to in the article.