The brand new video course in General Bulgarian as a Foreign Language at A1-A2 level aims at self-study and teaching Bulgarian language to students from the English speaking program.
It has been created for foreigners studying in English speaking programs in Bulgarian Universities but it is also appropriate for all who want to study Bulgarian language for other reasons. 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 opportunity to use the video course in two ways: teaching in a controlled learning environment (with the presence of a teacher) and autonomous learning in Blackboard with the help of contemporary electronic devices is an exceptional merit of this video course.
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 after conducting a thorough needs analysis. The gradual progression guarantees the presentation of the necessary lexical and grammatical items related to the most frequent communicative situations in the academic and social environment in Bulgaria and abroad.
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. The pragmatic value of the video course for self-study in an e-learning environment has been guaranteed by several factors such as translation of the focus vocabulary in English in the introduction of each unit; explanation of the usage and specifics of the grammatical categories in the Bulgarian language and providing autonomous language practice with assessment of the individual achievement on each topic in the Language Practice rubric. 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 video course is suitable for preparing for certification of language achievement on the ECL system. The exam can take place in authorized testing centers in Europe.
