Journalism and Media Curricula in Arab Universities

The study aims to reveal the consistency of the types of courses in the study plans of the bachelor’s programs and specializations in journalism and media in Arab universities, along with the classification of the UNESCO model curriculum courses on teaching journalism in developing countries. It adopted three types of courses that need to be included in any curriculum in the field of journalism teaching: Professional Training Courses (47%), Journalism Courses (10%), and arts and other sciences courses (43%). This model was applied to academic plans of journalism and media programs and specializations in nine Arab public universities covering the three Arab regions: The Levant and Iraq, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the Maghreb and North Africa. In addition, the study adopted the descriptive approach by analyzing and describing the components of the study plans in terms of form and content. The study results showed that the faculties and departments of communication and media in the selected sample of Arab Universities offer different programs more in teaching journalism and media disciplines. In contrast, communication studies are almost limited to public relations programs. As for the content level of the three courses (vocational training courses, journalistic studies courses, and courses from other arts and sciences) included in their study plans in different proportions, some of them are compatible with the estimates of the UNESCO model curriculum, while some are far away from these estimates. Also, there is a methodological and scientific gap between the practical and theoretical aspects in most of the selected sample of programs and disciplines. KEYWORDS University education in Arab countries, ideal journalistic competence, teaching methods, courses, vocational training, journalism and media studies

Rethinking Aural Skills Instruction through Cognitive Research

This essay responds to three papers appearing in this issue that relate music-cognitive research to aural skills pedagogy. Gary S. Karpinski focuses on tonic inference as support for do-based minor solfège pedagogy. My discussion supports this position, with evidence from key-profile experiments and corpus analyses. Timothy Chenette proposes a perceptually based learning sequence for aural skills instruction. He sketches a model curriculum, to which I propose a staffing solution and offer a research-based challenge: the high-voice superiority principle. Finally, Sarah Gates considers what the cognitive sciences can tell us about auditory imagery. I offer classroom strategies that take advantage of motor-area activation in the brain.

THE ROLE OF THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE AS A LEARNING SUBJECT IN THE FORMATION OF THE KEY COMPETENCES OF STUDENTS

At all times, in linguodidactics, the formation of a harmoniously developed personality, possessing all key competencies, has been topical. The implementation of this super-task to some extent was carried out in accordance with the time. The shift in educational paradigms has shown that the value of key competencies is a constant in didactics. And now the competence-based approach in education remains dominant. Despite the fact that a large amount of literature is devoted to the competence-based approach in general, the issue of ways of forming key competencies in private methods remains insufficiently illuminated. Еach subject has its own potential, which must be described. As we know, the educational material presented in the Model Curriculum needs scientific justification. In this regard, within the framework of this article, we make an attempt to consider the ways of forming the key competencies of students in the Russian language lessons in Kazakh schools.