The first in a series of very useful training sessions for LSP teachers at Montenegrin universities, planned within the ReFlame project and coordinated by the Faculty of Philology, has been successfully completed in cooperation with the European partners – the Institute of Applied Linguistics of the University of Warsaw and the University for Foreigners in Perugia, as well as the national partners – University of Donja Gorica and the Mediterranean University.

The teacher training session From texts to handouts and textbooks: Developing teaching materials for LSPwas led by Borbala Samu (University for Foreigners in Perugia), Elżbieta Gajek and Agnieszka Leńko Szymańska (University of Warsaw), the professors and lecturers with extensive experience in LSP teacher training as well as LSP teaching. The aim of the course was to instruct LSP teachers at the three Montenegrin universities how to followthe most important steps in creating LSP teaching materials andwriting LSP textbooks.

The teacher training session was organised online by means of Moodle platform of the Faculty of Philology, as well as Zoom and Microsoft Teams applications, which ensured its continuity in real time, as well as interactivity and a crucially important exhange of experience among colleagues.

36 LSP university teachers had a chance to listen to the instructors with great experience in modern methodology of teaching foreign languages (for specific purposes) share their knowledge regarding the use of corpus linguistics tools in the analysis of authentic texts to get prepared to create LSP teaching materials and write LSP textbooks to be used at three Montenegrin universities; copyright issues when using authentic texts in creating textbooks and teaching materials; assessment criteria of teaching tools and syllabi; selection of authentic texts to meet the needs and level of students’competence; methods of creating exercises and activities based on authentic texts, as well as preparing teaching materials for a special professional field. 

Apart from positive comments of all the participants, the quality of final assignments presentations made by the participants in groups or individually in advance and given during the last day of the teacher training course proved its remarkable success. Assignments included applying gained knowledge and acquired skills in preparing a well structured module/unit in different languages for specific purposes (in the fields of science and engineering, arts and humanities, business, law, travel and tourism, dentistry), which may serve as a pattern in creating the LSP teaching materials and writing LSP textbooks.

The success of the teacher training course confirmed by the quality of finished assignments makes us conclude that we have taken a secure step towards an achievement of one of concrete results of the ReFlame project – writing ten textbooks of foreign languages for specific purposes adjusted to the needs of the Montenegrin market,a task which will have been completed by the end of the second project year.

According to the current COVID-19 circumstances, the following Reflame training session will also be arranged online. It will focus on FLT methodology, and will be organised in cooperation with the above mentioned national partners, as well as the EU partners from the University of Zagreb and University for Foreigners in Perugia.