About the project
LSP Teacher Training Summer School (TRAILs), a thirty-month (2018-2021) project co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union, has addressed the issues of LSP teacher education and skills development with the aim of promoting high quality and innovative teaching in the field of Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP). It gathered eight partners: seven universities and one research centre:
- University of Bordeaux, France (coordinator)
- Univerza v Ljubljani, Slovenia
- Universidad de Cadiz, Spain
- Jade Hochschule, Germany
- Uniwersytet Im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu, Poland
- Sveučilište u Zagrebu, Croatia
- Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy
- Arcola Research Llp, United Kingdom
The project partners designed an innovative research-based training curriculum and a new LSP teacher training/education programme to be offered at European higher education institutions on a transnational collaborative basis because the problems identified in the research carried out within the project cannot be dealt with on a regional basis only.
Completion of the project
The first implementation of the programme took place from 22 to 26 February 2021 during the LSP teacher training/education pilot school (Winter School) held online due to Covid-19. The TRAILs Winter School was organised by the Croatian team, Brankica Bošnjak Terzić, PhD, Olinka Breka, PhD and Snježana Kereković, PhD, Chair of Technical Foreign Languages of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture, University of Zagreb. The TRAILs Winter School programme is based on an innovative curriculum designed by the project partners and presented in the form of different teaching/learning modules: Needs Analysis, Course/Syllabus Design, LSP Disciplinary Context, LSP Teaching Skills, LSP Materials, LSP Assessment, Transversal Skills in LSP, Language Corpora in LSP and Lesson Planning.
TRAILs Winter School Factfile:
- five days
- eight 90-min interactive plenary sessions
- seven 90-min group sessions (three parallel sessions, a total of 21 sessions)
- three 180-min group sessions
- two 90-min evaluation sessions (and two, pre- and post-School surveys)
- 30 participants (coming from all partner countries), among them
12 LSP practitioners and
18 future LSP practitioners (students of foreign languages and doctoral students)
- 21 trainers (partner teams)
- 2 evaluators
According to the evaluation results the TRAILs Winter School was an enormous success. The participants expressed great happiness for being part of the whole enterprise. They were extremely satisfied with the content, methodology, and the trainers’ expertise, approach and friendliness as well as the organisation of the Winter School, hoping to attend the next TRAILs School.
TRAILs Final Conference
The online final conference event was held on 19 March 2021. All intellectual outputs, results and evaluation of the TRAILs Winter School were presented along with the TRAILs Winter School’s training modules, content, and methodology (practical activities, lectures, tools used and organisational requirements). Specific target groups of this event were trainees and trainers, i.e. potential participants to the second and following editions of the TRAILs Winter School while the main objective was to disseminate the good practices identified during the project and attract new participants. 