Government school teachers in Punjab would soon be rolling their R’s thanks to a decision by the Punjab government to get British trainers to improve the standards of English in government schools.
Government school teachers in Punjab would soon be rolling their R’s thanks to a decision by the Punjab government to get British trainers to improve the standards of English in government schools.
Till now, government schools in Punjab were known for their abysmal English teaching.
The decision was taken in a meeting between Punjab chief minister Parkash Singh Badal and Britsih high commissioner Sir Dominic Asquith.
The British high commissioner welcomed the proposal of the chief minister and agreed to provide English language trainers to train local teachers so as to enable them to make their students proficient in the skills of writing and speaking the English language.
As per the agreement initially, nearly 3000 teachers across the state would be selected for the three year training course. The training module would be designed to upgrade the skills in teaching English as per international standards. The state government also decided to start an English teachers’ exchange programme between the United Kingdom and Punjab, with a view to provide an opportunity to the English language teachers to apprise them about their cultural and social scenario English culture.
Interestingly the standards of English language were abysmal in Punjab government schools as was evident from the class ten Punjab board results of this year. Out of nearly 3 lakh eighty thousand students who appeared for the class x examination more than eighty thousand flunked in English. When embarrassed state government tried to find the reason behind poor result in English in government schools they discovered that those teachers, who are teaching English themselves lack the basic knowledge of the language.
It is worth mentioning that, when education Minister of Punjab Daljeet Singh Cheema summoned the teachers whose students performed worst in the English and he got a big shock. As the Minister asked the teachers to write the reasons for the poor result. Most of the teachers could not write a single simple sentence correctly. It was at that time after getting a rude realty check of abysmal level of English in government schools that state government planned to provide special training for its teachers, which would now come in the form of British Trainers.
