For the last six years, Dr. Elena Belyaeva has been leading St Petersburg Bridges, a non-governmental, non-profit English Language Teaching (ELT) training and consulting center, which offers educational and training events to English language teachers and ELT managers all over Russia and the former Soviet Union territory. Dr. Belyaeva’s responsibilities include planning, design and delivery of various educational events; consulting top managers in foreign language teaching business in the areas of strategic planning, HRM, quality control; corporate EL training programs management and monitoring; educational audit of the foreign languages teaching quality in language schools; and developing partnerships with educational organizations towards effective cooperation.

Dr. Belyaeva made significant contributions to the educational reform in Russia in the area of English language teaching to facilitate the move from a school-based assessment to a centralized national examination in a format of a standardized test which has made the school assessment system more valid and reliable.

Dr. Belyaeva earned a five-year degree in philology at the St Petersburg State University, and a master’s degree in Applied English Linguistics from Birmingham University, UK. Later she completed two years of a doctoral program in Educational Research with the Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University and in 2006 she received a PhD in education from Moscow State University. Her PhD thesis was on the subject of linguistic auditing.

With increased globalization Russia has to pay greater attention to the language proficiency of its workforce. During her Humphrey Fellowship year, Dr. Belyaeva wishes to explore ways of providing businesses and industries with highly customized corporate foreign language training including cross-cultural components. She wishes to further develop an effective technology of linguistic auditing and to discover ways of improving the quality of corporate language training through a deeper needs analysis of the target language workplace.