The Status of English and Russian in Uzbekistan Musayev Tohirjon Abstract

New Approaches

As has been mentioned above, the main concentration has become to change the language learning from the traditional Soviet approach of grammar-translation, which was a usual method of teaching English for many years, into a communicative method, practised worldwide. The Ministry of Education with the support of The British Council and Macmillan have been creating textbooks for all stages of education incorporating state-of-art methods and techniques. Different specially-organized material designing teams are regularly trained in order to provide educational institutions with up-to-date teaching materials in addition to worldly acclaimed best-seller textbooks.

In view of educational reforms and high demand for English together with International practices in different spheres, the idea of introduction of education with English of medium of instruction started to seem feasible to the government. At present, educational establishments with English as a medium of instruction have become the most preferred institutions to study at. To meet the demand for the desire of people to be educated in English, the number of such institutions has been increasing from year to year.

These reforms have undoubtedly been aimed at integration with the Western World and acquiring information access as well as ability to keep up with the pace of changes taking place in the world. Looking back, now it becomes clear that the Uzbek government started the process of bringing the National Language closer to English “to enter the world community” and communicate effectively and effortlessly on an international level when it decided to convert the Uzbek alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin in 1993 (the law on Latin script adoption).