Tag: mirjana ljiljak-vukajlovic

24th Lingva In-house Workshop: Speaking Assessment Standardisation

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Immediately before summer holiday, as planned in the Lingva’s Annual Teacher Training and Development plan, the topic of our 24th in-house workshop, held by Director-of-Studies Mirjana Ljiljak-Vukajlović on 24th June, was Speaking Assessment Standardisation, as a sequel to earlier workshops on the same topic held on 15 October and 14 december 2010.

As in the previous workshops, the first part of our session was dedicated to familiarizing with CEFR speaking overviews and descriptors. In contrast to the event in 2010, when the second part included watching and discussing filmed samples of CEFR-calibrated oral production as part of a CoE-EAQUALS project, this time video clips of Cambridge English Examples of Speaking Tests were used first to identify the CEFR levels on the basis of the given speaking criteria and then to analyse which particular features of students performance indicate each specified level. The third stage involved studying the examiners’ commentaries on students performances and comparing them with our own.

The workshop proved to be very useful, especially in providing a much clearer picture of the performance required of students at each particular level and clarifying what each of five speaking assessment criteria – Range, Accuracy, Fluency, Interaction, Coherence – actually implies. Once again it was concluded that we have to be very careful not to be overly demanding when assessing lower level students and that students should not be penalized too much for mistakes as long as they do not impede understanding.

17th Cambridge YLE Certificate Award Ceremony at Lingva

odela Kembridž diploma u Lingvi
17th Cambridge YLE Certificate Award at Lingva

Here is one more beautiful day in this month full of certificates and awards! 19 of us, plus buddies, sisters, brothers, mums, dads, grannies, grandpas, auntie and uncles, as well as our teachers, have gathered at the big Lingva’s classroom to celebrate excellent results of Cambridge English Young Learners’ Exams on the Starters, Movers and Flyers levels. Starters were the best this year, with almost all winning 14 or 15 out of the total 15 Cambridge shields. Movers and Flyers almost reached them, earning 5 shields each in most of the language skills. Our best skill is speaking and we are ready to chat with friends from all over the world, in Valjevo, other places in Serbia, and other countries and show them how well we can use our English.

Presentations by Lingva Students of Technical English: Graphene

A dilligent group of Lingva students of Technical English at B2.a level from the Gorenje company has recently given presentations on a miraculous graphene material, for which two scientists, Geim and Novoselov won the Nobel prize in Physics in 2010. Graphene caught attention of several groups of scientits in Serbia as well, and Novak Đoković has been using racquets reinforced with graphene, which makes them lighter and more durable than rackets used to date. Vesna Kosovec, Dalibor Andrić, Vasilije Andrić and Vlada Petrović have made interesting presentations in which each of them, from their own perspective, pointed out countless advantages of this material of the future.

Graphene presentation by Vasilije Andrić

Graphene presentation by Dalibor Andrić

Graphene presentation by Vesna Kosovec

Graphene presentation by Vlada Petronijević

What Helps My Team Learn Better

In March this year Lingva Business English students at C1.b level from Gorenje took part in the multimedia project “What Helps My Team Learn Better“, one part of which refers to giving a presentation about a hobby or topic they are personally interested in and designing activities that will engage the most frequent multiple intelligences of the group in the best possible way. All of these student-made English learning activities are aimed at extending the scope of the given course syllabus with additional language practice, closely tailored to the needs of students. The diligent students did their best!

1. Learning to Sew & Something Else Presentation by Jelena Nikolic
2. Basketball – Healthy Lifestyle by Natasa Isailovic
3. Sport Marksmanship by Ivana Urosevic

23rd Lingva In-house Workshop: Writing Assessment Standardisation

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In accordance with the needs analysis of Lingva English language teachers, the 23rd in-house workshop was dedicated to writing assessment. A similar workshop was held On 18t February 2011 with some of the teachers attending both of these events.

Being one of the two most elusive and difficult areas for assessment, besides the speaking skills, since no black-and-white criteria can be set as in the case of listening, grammar and vocabulary, language teachers always appreciate efforts to practice assessment and marking. It is also beneficial for our language school to improve quality and consistency of writing assessment in order to ensure unifed and fair school assessment procedures for young adult and adult groups.

In the first session, teachers brushed up their knowledge of overall CEFR written assessment criteria and then familiarized themselves with the relatively new Cambridge Writing Assessment (sub)scales, first of all four subscales referenced to CEFR level descriptors: Content, Communicative Achievement, Organisation and Language. Special attention was given to clarifying the meaning of specific criteria in each of the subscales. In the second session, teachers were given samples of written students work at B1 and A2 levels to rate them individually and in pairs, which was followed by the whole group discussion. On this occasion, too, agreement was the highest in rating the language, while communicative achievement marks required more harmonizing.The session was ended by agreeing on the exact sets of criteria that will be used uniformly by all teachers for progress test and final exam assessment at each of language proficiency levels.

The workshop was prepared and facilitated by Mirjana Ljiljak-Vukajlović. The next workshop, which will focus on speaking assessment standardisation, will be held in June.

Experience Sharing between YALS Member Schools

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Three teachers from Tom & Emma School, Belgrade – Milana Papić, Jelena Mitrović, and Sofija Ljiljak-Vukajlovića visited Lingva last Thursday, 10 March, to see how LEGO® bricks and StoryStarter educational programme are used for foreign language learning in our school. They enjoyed working with our young learners on the activities designed by teacher Katarina Andrić at A2.c and B1.b levels, and they also had opportunity to familiarize themselves with the use of StoryVisualizer software, where they were joined by teacher Mirjana Ljiljak-Vukajlović.

The exchange was two-way – Lingva teachers learned which activities the guests had applied at Tom & Emma, and that they also had positive experience in the use of LEGO® elements with older students. The joint conclusion was that these activities exceptionally boost students’ creativity, which has a direct impact on the effectivenes of language acquisition.

It was confirmed once again that short exchange visits bring a lot of benefits to both sides and that we should continue with this good practice.

Cambridge CAE Certificates with the highest grades


Cambridge CAE certificate for June exams 2015 have finally arrived! After many years of invested efforts, Lingva students Sofija Rajković and Marijana Janković have realized one of their biggest dreams – not only have they passed the exam but they have also got the the highest grade, A, which means that their knowledge of English language is already at the upmost, C2 level, according to CEFR for languages. Congratulations to these extraordinary girls on their enormous success! We know that for them this diploma will open the doors of the most prestigious world organisations in their future careers.

22nd LINGVA Workshop on LEGO Language Teaching

22nd Lingva Workshop on LEGO Language Teaching
22nd Lingva Workshop on LEGO Language Teaching

After finishing teaching for this school year, Lingva teachers had an opportunity to run an inhouse workshop on integrating LEGO constructions into language teaching. It was our 22nd inhouse workshop titled Help Me Build My Story! Creating Picture Books, Comics and News Stories with LEGO Elements. Continuing its policy of continuing investment into the cutting edge teaching equipment and aids, Lingva has recently purchased an innovative educational Lego pack with expansion sets, together with respective software, aimed at boosting motivation of our young students for language learning and improving speaking and writing skills. The worskhop was set up and run by Marija Milovanović, Marija Matić and Mirjana Ljiljak-Vukajlović, and other teachers contributed to the activities with plenty of creative details for story “building”.

Work and Education Vocabulary

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In our present C1 course we have had to cope with a large amount of challenging new vocabulary items and most of the time practised it by describing personally relevant experiences. We have also tried to design some interactive activities and keep them permanently recorded to the web
so that we could go back to them from time to time and revise useful words and phrases, in this case connected to the topics of work and education.

Finding a Job Vocabulary by Marijana Janković

Feelings of Learners by Ana Petrović

Job Interview Vocabulary by Milica Milisavljević

Integrating Immigrants Vocabulary by Tamara Šarčević

Lingva Phrasal Verbs: Relationships by Mirjana Ljiljak-Vukajlović

25th Lingva Anniversary

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Since it was founded on 24 April 1990, Lingva has applied high quality standards and innovative approaches in language teaching/learning. Harmonization with European standards was performed in its first years of operation owing to its membership in YALS Association of Language Schools of Serbia. We have achieved very good cooperation with both domestic and foreign institutions, such as the Institute for Advancement of Education and the British Council, through both our own or joint projects with other schools and non-governmental organisations.

As early as 1995, Lingva integrated computer-aided learning activities into its curriculum, which was soon followed by a systematic use of multimedia projects, supported by the internet, IWB and mobile digital devices. Although the low profitability of the core educational activity has frequently necessitated use of additional translation income to support financing of new technologies, Lingva has never regretted making investments in expensive equipment since the attractiveness, topicality and relevance of the teaching content, along with the teachers’ enthusiasm, have always resulted in better motivation and more successful language acquisition. The plan for the next period is integration of interactive Lego Education systems, which are specially designed to stimulate curiosity, creativity and critical thinking as the necessary tools for effective lifelong learning.

In addition to general and special-purpose language courses, Lingva organises preparation for internationally recognized Cambridge and TOEFL exams. It has been the only school in Valjevo since 2000 to prepare 16 generations of 7 to 12 year old children for Cambridge Young Learners’ exams. All of this has contributed to high language proficiency levels of Lingva school leavers. It is exactly for this reason that many former Lingva students of different profiles have easily found employment all over the world. Numerous former Lingva students are studying to become or already work as language teachers, and some have come back to Lingva to apply the same methods as those through which they were once taught foreign languages.