IT Tralee has won its second ELL Award; the first one was in 2006 and now in 2020 for the VOCAL in Need EU project. This project was funded by the EU Commission and monitored/coordinated by the Irish NA (National Agency) Léargas.

IT Tralee (Dr Kristin Brogan) was the coordinator of the project with a total of ten partners from nine countries: apart from Ireland we had partners in Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Poland and Turkey.

VOCAL in NEED stands for “Vocationally Orientated Culture and Language in Need”  and the partnership designed an app for smartphones and five online training modules that bridges the linguistic and cultural gap by providing better interaction and communication skills for security staff and NGOs when dealing with migrants and refugees. The following languages are available: Arabic, Bulgarian, English, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Russian and Turkish.

Dr Kristin Brogan commented when receiving the Award: "The ELL Awards is a magnificent opportunity to celebrate the value of languages and inspire others. We are very happy to be one of the winners this year. We’re so proud of the project and the real impact that our apps have for those on the ground working with refugees and migrants so it’s fantastic to have that acknowledge at this level too. We’ve had great feedback from users of the apps with 97% reporting that they would recommend it to their colleagues. To have that seal of approval from the user group and now, this recognition from the European Language Label Awards – we’re delighted!”

The app and online modules can be found here: https://vocal.erasmus.site