COORDINATION BODY IMPROVES THE KNOWLEDGE OF SERBIAN AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

Presevo, Bujanovac - At the beginning of the 2015/2016 school year, the Coordination Body of the Government of the Republic of Serbia for the Municipalities of Presevo, Bujanovac and Medvedja began implementing a project aimed at improving the knowledge of Serbian as a second language of students who attend classes in Albanian.

Four primary schools in the municipalities of Bujanovac and Presevo, where classes are held in the Albanian language, are included in the project "Improvement of Serbian as a Second Language in the Municipalities of Presevo, Bujanovac and Medvedja", during the implementation of which Serbian language teachers will have teaching assistants.

One of the schools involved in the project is the "Muharem Kadriu" primary school in Veliki Trnovac, which is a village inhabited exclusively by Albanians.

Naim Saljihu, the Acting Director of the school, says that the Coordination Body wished by this project to help the students whose mother tongue is Albanian to better learn Serbian, and time will show how successful the project was.   

“There are a lot of teachers in the municipality of Presevo ​ who haven’t been trained to teach students the school subject of Serbian as a second language. The Coordination Body wished to provide assistance with  increasing the level of knowledge of the Serbian language, as it is, for instance, done in Vojvodina, since students from our village hear the Serbian language for the first time at school or on television. Time will show what the results of the project will be”, said Naim Saljihu.

Vjolca Sadiku, one of the seven teachers of Serbian at the school, who has a 35 years’ long experience in teaching at the school, says that students used to be more interested in learning Serbian.

“The project is welcome and I believe that we’ll work even more, while we’ll see how successful we are going to be.  However, one can’t be successful at a school where classes are held in Albanian if one can’t speak both the languages, Serbian and Albanian. It’s difficult to work with students if you can’t speak Albanian, especially here in Veliki Trnovac,” said Vjolca Sadilku, a teacher. 

Naim Saljihu, the Acting Director of the school, also said that he was pleased with the students, since although Veliki Trnovac was a village in which students didn’t have a chance to communicate in Serbian, one could find 10 to 15 of them in each classroom who could do so. 

Dragana Krstic, who is a teacher of Serbian from Nis, is a teaching assistant for the subject of Serbian as a second language at the school.  Before coming to the school, she attended the seminars that were held by experts in teaching Serbian as a second language from the Universities of Belgrade and Novi Sad.

“This is the first time that primary school students are having teaching assistants.  When it comes to my first impressions, I’m very satisfied. We stick to the teaching schedule, which we adjust to the level of students’ knowledge.  We, along with the teachers, teach the children Serbian, which they need for their daily communication.  The most difficult thing for me is the fact that I can’t speak Albanian. However, we, the teachers who recently stated working at these four primary schools, began attending classes in the Albanian language, so that we could master the terminology in Albanian that we need for working with the children.   The children are very pleased when I speak Albanian during classes, so that we mutually exchange knowledge”, said Dragana Krstic, a teacher.

The project is to be implemented until the end of the current school year or until July 15, 2016.

Source: Titulli, OK Radio and Coordination Body