The activity of the department has the following aims:

• to assist employees of scientific institutions in formation and improvement of a foreign language communicative and professional competence;
• to overcome language barriers and ethnocentrism;
• to foster respect for the mentality, culture and traditions of the European community in the process of learning languages;
• to encourage the pursuit of academic multilingualism, defined by the European language portfolio;
• to preserve the linguistic and methodical traditions of the Petersburg (Shcherba’s) scientific school, developing them with the involvement of modern technologies.

As part of postgraduate education and competition, classes on the subject “History and philosophy of science” are held. This course teaches the main stages of the history of scientific knowledge and science as a public institution, basic concepts of the philosophy of science, logic and methodology of science, foundations of historical and logical (re-) design of scientific research, general scientific research methods, development of interdisciplinary research, general cognitive sciences , attitude to science as a vocation and profession, value dimension of scientific work and responsibility of a scientist for the consequences of research.
The course “History and Philosophy of Science”, as well as philosophy in general, is harmoniously combined with the study of foreign languages, since it is associated with the development of historical and modern terminology of science, the art of naming the phenomena under study, and understanding the meaning of words in scientific international communication. This serves as a condition for the transition of a specialist to a different, more general view of work.

The field of activity of the teachers of the Department now includes not only graduate students training for the candidate's exam, but also preparation of employees of research departments in foreign languages, namely English, which serves as an international language mediator in the field of science and scientific communication of specialists, as well as German and French.

Awareness of the need to improve the methodology of teaching foreign languages led to targeted research in the field of theoretical linguistics and linguodidactics as its applied field. In the process of studying of linguistic principles of teaching of a foreign language, the author’s teaching methodology, that was theoretically and experimentally justified, was being lined up. That methodology was aimed at teaching to perceive live foreign speech which generally has always been the cornerstone of an effective methodology of teaching a language, according to Scherba’s unity of research and teaching.

The department prepared and defended theses:

• In 2009, T.N. Chugaeva defended her doctoral thesis “The sound structure of the language in the perceptual aspect (experimental study on the material of the English language) (02.10.19 - the theory of language) in the dissertation council D 212.232.23. St. Petersburg State University.
• In 2008, O.V. Baiburova defended her thesis "The Mechanisms of Perception of Different Types of an English Word" (02.10.19 - theory of language) in the dissertation council D 212.189.11 of Perm State University (scientific adviser T. N. Chugayeva).
• In 2013 G.V. Porchesku defended her thesis "The structure of the English sentence in the perceptual aspect" (2. 10. 04 - Germanic languages) in the dissertation council D 212.163.01 of the Nizhny Novgorod State Linguistic University. N. A. Dobrolyubova (scientific adviser T. N. Chugayeva).
• In 2016 S.Yu. Myakotnikova defended her thesis "Perceptive features of the sound structure of the American version of the English language" (2. 10.1919 - theory of language) in the dissertation council of Perm State National Research University (supervisor T.N. Chugaeva).

Under the leadership of TN. Chugayeva, work on three candidate's theses continues.

The department maintains friendly international relations with fellow teachers of English from the UK, America, Germany, Canada, both in the field of teaching English as a foreign language, and linguistic studies (Oxford, Educational department, Providence college, Canada).

For several years, the PFRC UB RAS regularly held meetings of the English club of free communication Java Jaw with native English speakers in its British and American versions.

In 2007 our Canadian colleagues Prof. Douglas Sadler and Dr John McNeil (PhD Linguistics) successfully conducted a workshop "Paradigms for Growth in EFL / ESL Teaching" (TESOL course) with the aim of improving qualifications of university teachers of English in the city of Perm.

Together with the specialists of the Department of Phonetics and Foreign Language Teaching Methods of St. Petersburg State University, an interuniversity workshop “Traditions and Innovations in Teaching a Foreign Language” is regularly held. Its aim is to increase the level of methodological, phonetic and linguistic training of teachers.

The Department of Foreign Languages maintains friendly relations with other departments of foreign languages universities of Perm and other cities. Close ties are maintained with the Department of Linguistics and Translation of Vyatka State Humanitarian University (within the framework of a cooperation agreement with VSHU), the Department of Intercultural Communication of Petrozavodsk State University, etc.
Publishing is actively carried out. In 2005 the department published (with the support of the academic institutes of ITC, ICMM, MI and IEGM) a tutorial on listening to English speech “Listening Challenge” (T.N. Chugayeva, O.V. Baiburova, A.Thaker, etc.) which is successfully used in the process of teaching English. In 2010, together with the Department of Phonetics and Techniques of St. Petersburg State University, the handbook on monophthongs by G. S. Trotsenko was published as well as other educational manuals in English and German.

From 2011 to 2017, there was active work on the development and publication of TERRA LINGUA materials in the “Journal of Perm Scientific Center”, which forms awareness of patterns of mastering various foreign languages for the reader, both linguistic and psychological, on traditional and new effective methods and ways of mastering the language studied. The materials of the rubric are aimed at the communion to the world and culture of the target language. In total, there were 14 issues devoted to the issues of various languages (English, German, French, Spanish, American English, Scottish English, Chinese, Russian) and countries.

From 2014 to 2018, the Department carried out a research and educational project in collaboration with philologists of Perm Classical University, arabists of the Institute of International Relations, History and Oriental Studies of Kazan Volga Federal University and specialists of the Nizhny Novgorod State Linguistic University, Chechen State University. At the beginning of 2018 the book “TerraLingua: In the world of language, languages in the world” was published and edited by B.V. Kondakov and T.N. Chugayeva (publishing center "Titul"). The presentation of the book took place in Perm, Grozny, St. Petersburg and aroused great interest of a wide circle of readers and specialists.

Research activities:

• scientific research in the field of theoretical and applied linguistics, theory of language acquisition, theory of speech activity, psycholinguistics and linguodidactics;
• development of theoretical problems of perceptual linguistics, psycholinguistics, the theory of mastering foreign languages, the perception of sounding foreign language speech to ensure the modern level of teaching foreign languages, the creation and application of the latest, including the author's teaching methods;
• participation with reports at the International Philological Conference held by St. Petersburg State University, as well as in other international and regional linguistic conferences.