The Slovene Association of LSP Teachers

PRESENT PROJECTS


● Project [kju:]
The goal of the [kju:] project is to gradually build a corpus infrastructure in order to facilitate the development of corpus-based contrastive research of language, rhetorics and discourses in Slovenia. The leader of the project is Šarolta Godnič Vičič (UP Turistica).

You are welcome to join the project.


● Foreign language proficiency in higher education
In this project Šarolta Godnič Vičič aims to find out the foreign language proficiency levels of Slovene students entering higher education. The collected data will be used to help the students, their teachers and the LSP association.
She started a project web page where you can find more details.


● ICT and LSP teaching
Information and communication technologies (ICT) have high pedagogical potential for LSP. For this reason, in 2006, we began organising computer workshops. Two years later the E-learning SIG was established with the following goals:
- increasing computer literacy among LSP teachers and helping
   develop their ICT skills,
- fostering LSP teachers' lifelong learning of ICT skills,
- raising awareness among professionals and the wider public of
   examples of good practice in the pedagogical application of ICT in
   Slovenia and abroad,
- providing support to the members in their ICT-based projects.
The members of the E-learning SIG are Šarolta Godnič Vičič, Saša Sirk, Saša Podgoršek, Polona Vičič and Vida Zorko. They have held numerous workshops for language teachers (see photo archive 1 and photo archive 2).



PAST PROJECTS


● Walls Talking
The Walls Talking project was an open image-based project and an experiment in online collaboration. The idea behind it was to 'listen' to the graffiti talk around us and to record and share interesting finds utilizing the project main site, Flickr group and wiki. There are walls talking all over our schools, streets, towns, countries, world. By sharing images and ideas we can learn more about ourselves and about the world we live in.

The project was initiated by Saša Sirk who inspired many Slovenian and foreign teachers to join in. Together, they explored the pedagogical potential of the project for EFL and ESP learning.


● Language for specific purposes (LSP) in higher education programmes, post-secondary vocational programmes and language school programmes
The project team members are Melita Djurić, Šarolta Godnič Vičič and Violeta Jurković. Their goals were to examine the state in the field of LSP teaching before the implementation of the Bologna reform, to find connections between similar language programmes, to find solutions to the existing problems and to improve teaching quality as well as recognition of our profession.

Contact us for more information on the project.


● Foreign languages in vocational colleges
Darja Mertelj and Helena Žnidaršič did in foreign language programmes in vocational colleges. They analyzed new syllabi for post-secondary vocational study programmes in Slovenia to obtain an insight into the current language courses.


● EFL blogging within the Writingmatrix project – engaging students in collaborative writing through social networking, an international project where our member, Saša Sirk, participated
Vance Stevens set out the Writingmatrix project and invited foreign language teachers to join it with their classes. The project brings together students aspiring to different professional degrees from here and there. Participating teachers are mostly members of the international community of practice Webheads in Action, a community of educators from across the globe interested in experimenting with the Internet technologies.

Students post their writings in their blogs (freely choosing their topics) and tag their posts using an agreed anchor tag 'writingmatrix'. Using Technorati they can then simply find the posts of everyone involved in the project. Students read and comment the posts they like, use Google Reader or Bloglines to subscribe to interesting blogs, podcasts, etc. They use del.icio.us to save, share and explore favorites.

The Writingmatrix project was presented at Webheads in Action Online Convergence 07 and at K12 Online 07. In March 2008 an article titled ‘Writingmatrix: Connecting Students with Blogs, Tags, and Social Networking’ was published in TESL-EJ.

The project is open to interested teachers and students, you can read more about it here.


● Workshop - Computer-supported LSP teaching
In the spring 2008 we organised a workshop titled Computer-supported LSP teaching in which participants acquired the computer skills necessary for successful LSP teaching. The workshop combined input lectures and practical work. The program included the use of the online computer tools Vocabulary profiler and Hypertext writer for development of students vocabulary and reading skills, concordancers and specialised corpora, the Hot potatoes software for materials writing, the program Excel for grading students test papers and  keeping evidence of test results,the program Powerpoint for preparing presentation slides, as well as the use of wikis and blogs in collaborative learning.

You can view some photos here.


● Problem Based Learning
After a six-year activity, the Association's Problem-based Learning (PBL) special interest group completed their work in 2006 with the publishing of the book 'Guide to PBL within the Context of ESP'. In the last phase of the group's activity, one of the major goals was, apart from the publishing of the guide, organisation of a round table in cooperation with Slovensko društvo za visokošolsko didaktiko (the Slovenian Association for Higher Education Didactics) on the topic of cooperation between higher education teachers. The round table is scheduled for the year 2007.

In the last phase of its activity, the PBL group continued to publish articles on problem based learning. An online article was published in Developing Teachers, titled 'Problem-based Learning in an ESP classroom  in tertiary education in Slovenia.

You can find more about the whole project at PBL in Slovenia.


● Leonardo da Vinci projects TENTEC and LENTEC in which one of our members participated
The project Leonardo da Vinci TENTEC (Teaching English for Technical Purposes) ran from 1999 to 2000 and involved teachers from Sweden, Estonia, France, the Netherlands, Denmark and Slovenia with the aim of introducing the problem based learning concept to the teaching of English to technical students. In 2001 this was followed by a new project, LENTEC (Learning English for Technical Purposes), with participants from the same countries. The projects goal was to promote student virtual mobility by working with other nationalities in a common language to solve common technical problems. The project was completed in 2003.

For more information contact Bernarda Kosel who participated in the projects as a partner from Slovenia. You can also visit the TENTEC and LENTEC websites. All materials on the project websites are downloadable and 'A guide to the problem based learning in virtual mobility groups' in book form is available for free. Contact person: Bernarda Kosel.

PROJECTS