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Meeting of the target groups participants from Slovakia and Finland
(Slovakia, 25 - 29 May, 2001)

A shortage of vocational language skills among forestry staff and the absence of quality
study materials in the area of vocational language education in the forestry sector
were the reasons for this project elaboration.

The main objective of the project is to support and strengthen
the vocational language education in the forestry sector.

The objective of this activity is to develop quality study material for teaching of vocational forestry English. New and innovative teaching methods will be used and made internationally available in English. A course book will contain terminology highly relevant in modern forestry including: forest establishment, silviculture, protection, harvesting, game management, wood grading, forestry marketing, environmental issues. An example of the chapter can be read/downloaded as
a MS Word file

or as PDF document

in case you have
the Acrobat Reader 3.0

or later.

Multimedia CD development is in close connection with utilisation of study material. The CD will serve as a tool to simplify a study of vocational forestry English. Besides vocabulary and typical forestry issues, it will contain exercises focused on pronunciation and video clips which will deal with particular forestry operations (for example: silviculture, forest protection, harvesting, and wood grading)

A selected group of teachers from Slovakia and Finland will take part in a seminar focusing on teaching of vocational forestry English. Participants of the seminar will become familiar with innovative teaching methods, which have been using in EU countries. Then the names of the project teacher-trainers will be enlisted in the database of The Institute of Training and Education and will be used as vocational forestry English lecturers in the future.

The curricula for vocational forestry English courses will be developed. The duration of training course will be 6 weeks, with 2 weeks intensive periods and 4 weeks of distance learning. The course will be certified by the national authorities (by Ministry of Education in Slovakia) and may be used also in other countries of Europe.

During the project three training courses are going to be organised. The target group will be people who are familiar with common English and with ability to speak in English. They should be employees in the forestry sector (in Slovakia they should be from state, non-state forestry sector or from Ministry of Agriculture and authorities which belong to the Ministry) or students of Forestry faculty of the Technical University in Zvolen. Preliminary date for realisation of the courses is March-May 2001 and they will be held in Banská Štiavnica. The courses will focus mainly on effective communication in important forestry topics and they will contain:

- intensive period (5 days, Banská Štiavnica)
- distance learnig period (4 weeks, self-studying)
- intensive period (5 days, Banská Štiavnica)

The number of participants each group will be from 10 to 12. After the project end, the courses will continue according to interest.

Target group of participants from Slovakia