ON FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING CONDITIONS IN MOLDOVAN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

Republic of Moldova is known as a country in transition. Since early 1990's reforms have touched many domains of socio-linguistic development, education included. After 1989 there was registered a radical change in the approach of foreign language teaching. The number of private and state Higher Education Institutions has significantly been increased throughout the republic. One of the greatest challenges in Moldova is providing sufficient foreign language education so as to meet the growing demand especially after a long period of times when foreign languages were seriously neglected. The major research problem is that the Moldovan government doesn't invest so much in foreign language teaching in result this decreases the motivation of teachers involved in foreign language teaching process and students don't get good learning conditions. The main goal of the given paper is to highlight the key reforms introduced in foreign language teaching in old and recently opened Higher Education Institutions of Moldova and to describe foreign language learning conditions which occurred after USSR collapse. Other objectives of the article under discussion are to determine the lacks foreign language teachers and learners in Moldova come across with while foreign language study and to offer some recommendations as how to improve the current situation of foreign language learning conditions in the local regional Universities situated in the South of Moldova which don't have at their disposal any Language Laboratories equipped with Audio and Video materials where students could train their pronunciation. Computer assisted classes are also missing. The statistic results show that the demands for foreign languages are getting higher but teaching and learning conditions haven't been improved so far especially in recently opened Universities. The methods used during the research are: employing theory, observation, description, statistic analysis, survey.