Varna Medical University Press has issued the first part of the textbook “I Study in Bulgaria”. It has been created for foreigners studying in English speaking programs in Bulgarian Universities. The main aim of the video course is to develop the four communicative skills: listening, reading, speaking and writing by using attractive teaching materials such as authentic films, audio recordings, original visualizations and amusing language tasks.
The communicatively oriented strategy guarantees sociolinguistic adaptation in a Bulgarian environment and acquiring skills for self-expression.
The course gives the student an opportunity to study in a controlled learning environment (with the presence of a teacher) as well as to practice autonomous learning in Blackboard with the help of contemporary electronic devices.
The video course was designed in 2016-2017 by a team of 6 authors, teaching Bulgarian at the Medical University in Varna. All materials were created to meet the foreign students’ language needs.
The structure covers 10 topics with 3 (or 2) subtopics each in the following major thematic fields: getting to know each other/acquaintances; learning, shopping, family, everyday life, weather and seasons, health and diseases, culture, sports and hobbies. An appendix with a Bulgarian-English glossary containing 3 200 lexical items with indicated grammatical categories such as sex and number of nouns, aspect, conjugation and imperative forms of verbs is provided to support the organization of the vocabulary being taught and learnt.
All materials are created specially for the video course and include 80 video films with 80 tasks for listening comprehension that amount to 250 pages, A4 format with materials for individual work, organized around 10 topics.
A corpus of tests has been created for the Blackboard platform to establish the communicative competence of individual students in Bulgarian as a foreign language at A2 level. The tests are computer-based and check the receptive skills listening and reading after the 5th and 10th unit. There are 80 tests altogether which contain 800 items connected to the 10 topics.
The textbook is distributed to junior year international medical students in MU-Varna free of charge.