Professor Svetlana Grigor'evna Ter-Minasova

Professor Svetlana Grigor’evna Ter-Minasova is one of the leading foreign language specialists and teachers, who has built up a formidable international reputation. She has made a great contribution to the development of international understanding through her indefatigable and enthusiastic promotion of the teaching of foreign languages in both its practical and scholarly aspects. 

Svetlana Ter-Minasova was born in Moscow on 25, August 1938. 

At present professor Svetlana Ter-Minasova is President of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies at Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia, and Professor Emeritus in the University. She holds a Doctorate of Philology from the University, and has published more than 200 books and papers on Foreign Language Teaching, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, and has lectured widely throughout the world. 

She is chairperson of the FLT Council (Ministry of Education, Russia) since 1987. She has been the founding President of both National Association of Applied Linguistics (NAAL, Russia) an affiliate of the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) since 1989 and the founding President of National Association of Teachers of English (NATE, Russia), a collective member of the International Associations TESOL (the USA) and IATEFL (the UK); since 1995 the chairperson of the FLT Council (Ministry of Education and Science, Russia). She holds the Lomonosov Award, Fulbright’s 50th Anniversary Award, and was named Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Birmingham in the UK, the State University of New York in the USA, the Russian-Armenian University, in Armenia and the Visiting Professor by the National Research Tomsk State University. She is a member of IAFOR International Advisory Board. 

In 1970 Svetlana Grigor'evna defended her candidate dissertation on the subject: “The Synthesis of Productive and Semi-Productive Collocations and the Problem of the Logic of Language”, in 1982 – a doctorate thesis “The Syntagmatics of Functional Styles”. 

In 1983 by the order of MSU rector, she was appointed head of the Foreign Languages Department of the History Faculty. 

From 1988 to 2012 Professor Ter-Minasova was the founding dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages created on her initiative. In 2001 Area Studies were introduced into the curriculum of FFL, and in 2004 it was renamed into the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies. 

Since 1991 she has been heading the Department of FLT Theory. In 2012 Professor Ter-Minasova was promoted to the honorary position of President of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies. 

Her academic interests embrace syntax, morphology, lexicology, lexicography, stylistics, linguopoetics, theories and methods of FLT, Russian studies, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, intercultural communication. 

Svetlana Grigor'evna gave general courses on English syntax and special courses: “The Fundamentals of the Theory of Word-combinations”, “Syntagmatics of Functional Styles” at the English department, Philological Faculty; a special course “Language and Society” at the department of Ethnology, History Faculty; “The World of the Language under Study”, “The Textology of Scientific Discourse”, “Language and Intercultural Communication”, “The Sociocultural Component of Speech Production and its Part in Language Teaching” at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies. 

At present Professor Ter-Minasova pays special attention to ELT theory and methods and to problems of interlingual and intercultural communication, participates actively in conferences and gives lectures on the subject in Russia and abroad. 

Svetlana Grigor'evna Ter-Minasova has published more than 200 academic papers in this country and abroad which include 10 scholar monographs and 7 textbooks. Most important include: 

From 1963 to 1993 she supervised the Students’ English Theatre which won prizes at Students’ Festivals and Competitions and toured the country very successfully. 

She has supervised more than 60 candidate and doctorate dissertations. She has been the chairperson of the specialized Academic Council for defending candidate and doctorate dissertations on Romance-Germanic philology and foreign language teaching theory and methods since its foundation in 1991. 

In 2014 parts of Svetlana Grigor'evna Ter-Minasova’s book “Notes by a Dinosaur” were published in “The Youth” (Юность) magazine. It is a book about her life that she has spent mostly (from 1956) in Moscow State University. The book is published by “SLOVO” in 2015.