On 4th October, English language courses for employees of local governments were started as part of a project of YALS Association of English Language Schools under the sponsorship of the America Embassy in Belgrade.

The project is titled Teaching English to Serbian civil servants working at local government units with the focus on practical skills needed to communicate more fluently with EU counterparts. It will be implemented from September 2021 to June 2022 and it includes 130 participants from 11 cities and towns selected from all over Serbia. The project is managed by the YALS project team consisting of:

Sofija LJiljak-Vukajlović, Project Manager
Mirjana Grandov Lacić, Project Coordinator
Danijela Karafilipović, Project Accountant

For this purpose, the YALS team for ELT/L material design has compiled a special handbook called Skills Booster, which covers the functional language and skills relevant to the situations in the work of civil servants, such as creating a CV, active participation in meetings, writing formal emails/letters, creating and giving presentations and use of helpful digital tools, within the topics related to communal, urbanistic and economic activities, as well as the cultures of European Partners, USA and Serbia.

The first lessons were successful, with a lot of teacher enthusiasm and student motivation, and the impressions are highly positive. “This is exactly what we need”, “What we lacked is a solid language revision like this one” ” and “Now we can clarify all our language doubts” – those were some of the students’ comments after the lessons held.