Artem P. Gulov

The relevance of the study stems from the fact that, in the context of digitalization of education and the growing ethnocultural diversity of the student body, it is insufficient for a university to merely declare the values of support and solidarity; empirically validated models of an environment in which these values are sustainably reproduced in everyday communication are required. Virtual professional communities of teachers are becoming an important resource for continuous development and mutual assistance, yet their value-normative foundations and support mechanisms remain insufficiently described, despite their potential for the axiological design of the socio-educational environment of a multi-ethnic university. The purpose of the article is to identify the values of support and solidarity in the discourse of a virtual community of foreign language teachers and to substantiate the possibilities of transferring them to the design of the environment of a multi-ethnic university. The methodological framework employs a mixed design: quantitative descriptive analysis and qualitative thematic-discursive analysis. The empirical base consists of a cluster of eight open communities of English language teachers on VKontakte, focused on preparation for high-stakes examinations; 548 original posts and 2,340 comment threads were analyzed for the period from September 1 to December 31, 2025. The results show that communication in the virtual teacher community is structured around four interconnected value cores: recognition of vulnerability and the right to make mistakes, horizontal collegiality and respect for difference, mutual assistance as a norm of professional behavior, and collective responsibility expressed in the translation of emotionally charged requests into jointly developed action plans. The theoretical significance of the work lies in understanding virtual professional communities as axiologically organized environments in which the values of support and solidarity are embedded at the level of micro-practices, genres, and roles. The practical significance is associated with substantiating the principles of transferring the identified value mechanisms to the digital and hybrid spaces of a multi-ethnic university – the creation of student mutual assistance communities, the development of mentoring systems and cultural mediation, the design of rules for supportive communication and soft moderation, which makes it possible to form a university environment in which support and solidarity become an everyday norm of interaction and a resource for the academic and sociocultural adaptation of international and Russian students.

The article considers the problem of describing the professional competence of a (trainee) language teacher in the context of the transformation of the higher education system in Russia and the transition to new educational standards. The aim of the work is to identify and systematize the characteristics of the professional competency of a language teacher, which can be presented in the form of competences of graduates from language teacher education programs. The main research method is a comparative analysis of the Federal State Educational Standard of higher education in the areas of «Pedagogical education» and «Linguistics», Educational Standards of Moscow State University in the same areas and the Professional Standard «Teacher». The main results of the article include the identification of common types of professional activity in the analyzed standards, which made it possible to single out the language teacher education profile as combining the areas of «Linguistics» and «Pedagogical education»; definition of six basic professional competences of a language teacher (general pedagogical, methodological (linguodidactic), communicative, research, managerial, self-educational). An analysis of the wording of competences in the standards made it possible to identify competences that are difficult to unambiguously relate to a specific type of professional activity based on their wording. It was also found out that there are individual direct and semantic repetitions in the competences designated by different codes. A conclusion is made about an excessive number of competences in individual standards, the absence of a system-forming concept of competence (correlation with a specific type of professional activity) in 27 of the analyzed competences, and the question is raised about the practicality of having different wording of professional competences of a trainee teacher at different universities. The theoretical significance of the article lies in the systematization of existing approaches to defining the professional competences and the development of a model of basic professional competences of a language teacher. The practical value lies in formulating proposals for describing competences in the new generation of standards currently being developed. In particular, it is proposed to reduce the number of competences in the new standards, unify the designations of identical competences, develop unified competency maps for graduates of language teacher training and tools for assessing their development in university graduates.