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During recent years, Russian universities have demonstrated intention to get integrated into international education and research. One of such universities is National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University (hereafter TPU). Achievement of this goal requires a perfect level of English proficiency among TPU academic staff. This fact gave birth to a new direction in the work of TPU EFL teachers – searching for ways of improving English proficiency among TPU academics. A research devoted to this problem is being conducted in TPU. Before starting the main study, a group of researchers initiated a pilot survey to get an overall state of the problem. So, the paper involves literature review, deals with the results of the pilot survey covering TPU academics’ perceptions on language learning. Along with that, conclusions are formulated and further steps are outlined.