The Regional Language Olympiad Brought Together School Students of North Kazakhstan Region

For more than 20 years, our university has been hosting the regional school Olympiad in language subjects. This time, more than 370 students from 93 schools in Petropavlovsk and 11 districts of the North Kazakhstan Region gathered with us.

The intellectual competition is aimed at developing the creative abilities and research interest of 10th–11th grade students who have shown a special interest in language studies, creating the necessary conditions to support gifted children, promoting scientific knowledge, increasing academic motivation, developing students’ public speaking skills, as well as providing career guidance for school graduates. Participants compete in literature, Kazakh, English, Russian, German, and French.

The Olympiad is organized in two stages. First, students demonstrate their ability to express their thoughts in written form through an essay. In the second round, such types of speech activity as reading, listening, and speaking are assessed.

In addition, the Olympiad serves as a discussion platform for teachers of the region to exchange experience and discuss current pedagogical issues. These topics were addressed at the seminars: “Improving Modern Foreign Language Education,” “Formation of Professional Competencies as a Condition for Training a Competitive Graduate,” and “The Content and Effectiveness of Teaching the Kazakh Language in Schools with Non-Kazakh Language Instruction.”

It has also become a good tradition within our Olympiad to hold meetings with stakeholders to present innovative methods and technologies in language teaching.