Themed meetings for first and third year international students “Irkutsk Alphabet” were held at the BSU Department of International Studies.

The name of the events are connected with the festival - contest “The Irkutsk Alphabet”, which was held in winter in Irkutsk in the framework of the project “Ice City. Bliss of pure water”. At that time, during excursions around winter Irkutsk in the Kirov Square, Chinese students are acquainted with 33 ice sculptures - letters of the “Irkutsk Alphabet”, each of which symbolized the most interesting sights of Irkutsk and Baikal.

Thematic meetings for first and third year international students were organized in the form of artistic credits and academic conferences. Chinese students of the third year prepared presentations and reports, the theme of which was one of the letters of the “Irkutsk alphabet”: letter A - Angara, letter B - Babr, BSU, letter V - Vampilov A. V., etc.

The reports and presentations were evaluated by experts, teachers of the Department of Russian Language and Cross-Cultural Communication Vagenletner M. S., Kichatinova O. V., Kuryanova S. A.. Not only the accuracy and completeness of linguocountry and linguoregional material (students study this material in all courses of Russian as a foreign language), but also the craft of public speaking were taken into account.

Foreign students at Baikal State University study not only Russian language, but also the history and culture of Russia, Baikal region, and Irkutsk. Many of them connect their future professional activity with Russia, with Irkutsk, as well as with teaching Russian as a foreign language to Chinese schoolchildren and students in China.