Job Alert: According to The St. Petersburg Times (the one in Russia) reports that Sochi 2014 recently hired English First to teach English to potentially 70,000 Russians in advance of the 2014 Winter Olympics. If that sounds ambitious, well, it is. Also, if that sounds like one hell of a classroom, well, the paper reports that most of the teaching will be done in virtual classrooms (even though I'm pretty sure I took an undergrad science course with 70,000 students. I think we only had 3 TAs, but I digress...). This is Olympics-specific in that the goal is to train volunteers, taxi drivers, athletes, etc; pretty much anybody who might come in contact with foreigners willing to pull their bulletproof vest out of storage and go to the Olympics.
But, as I've learned from following the goings on in Sochi, it's also part of a wider initiative to develop more English-speaking civil servants in Russia. There's a movement afoot in Russia make 20% of the current government employees conversational in English, a movement that goes hand-in-hand with the government's plan to make basic English a requirement for all new federal employees as soon as next year.
Incidentally, there's an 'English First' initiative rearing its head again in the US, though I'm not sure it's in the same spirit.
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