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Moscow’s City Duma has suggested an amendment to a new law that would require all teachers to apply for work permits… in addition to the work visas which currently allow them to teach here. Also, according to the amendment’s author, Tatyana Potyayeva, the deputy head of the City Duma’s Science and Education committee, the move is necessary after some foreign teachers were responsible for “inciting ethnic and religious strife” in educational centres.
In practical terms, notes NM Weekly, the proposal means that schools and colleges have to spend up to three months processing the paperwork for new recruits, compared with about one month at present. English language schools, which have enjoyed years of growth, often recruit staff with either the Cambridge Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA) or the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) certificate, which might now become insufficient for would-be teachers in Russia.
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United Kingdom: The jobs of up to 80 staff at Hounslow Language Service are under threat after councillors agreed they should withdraw almost 20% of its funding.
YourLocalGuardian notes that the service – which provides specialist support for over 7,000 schoolchildren from ethnic minorities in developing their English – has 105 teaching and management staff, of which 86 are qualified teachers and 19 are language assistants employed by the council.
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The Deputy Prime Minister, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, has called on educators to give their 100 per cent support to the changes to the national education policy, particularly the decision to revert the teaching of Science and Mathematics in English to the Malay language from 2012.
“I expect a 100 per cent support from educators, without exception”, reports bernama.com. ”It won’t be good if, for instance, educators are divided over the decision. When the government makes a decision, it is doing so with a clear rationale. The educators should, therefore, be committed in upholding and supporting the decision,” he said at a gathering with educators at the Putrajaya International Convention Centre (PICC) here Tuesday.
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Pupils at 25 infant and primary schools throughout Murcia will be offered the chance of bilingual education in the next academic year under a programme which will offer a third of the schools’ classes in English, notes the Typically Spanish website.
This regional government programme will benefit more than one thousand children, and begins, in a first phase, with the first year of primary education, to be extended gradually to all other years at the schools involved.
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According to the Times of India, as part of its global vision for English, the British Council has launched the programme ‘Project English’ in India and Sri Lanka. The aim is that by 2010 every teacher and learner of English in the world will have access to skills, ideas and materials they need from the UK. “This global ambition got a local fillip when, during his visit to India in 2008, Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister met his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh and committed the British Council to train, directly or indirectly, 750,000 English teachers in India over the next five years (2013).
In order to achieve this vision, we have carved our work into three strands: corporate training, state partnerships and direct teaching of English,” said Chris Gibson, director, Project English (India and Sri Lanka).
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The Ottowa Citizen notes that when Awo Farah arrived in Canada from Djibouti in 2001 to seek a better education, the nine-year-old Grade 5 student couldn’t speak English. Eight years later, it’s amazing how her life has developed … all for the positive.
Farah would substitute the word “crazy” for “amazing” to describe her early months in her new country as she used her outgoing personality to learn to speak English with her friends, became a strong academic student and was a highly recruited basketball player by several universities.Rideau athletic director Sherri Tanner understands why Farah has succeeded. “Her social personality allowed her to pick up conversational English and her involvement in sport gave her confidence and a place to work on her communication skills.”
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It’s a new style of teaching and reaching out to English-language learners. It uses charts and chants and turns students into “super scientists” and “experts,” putting them in control of their education, proponents say.
The teaching style is known as Guided Language Acquisition Development, or “GLAD,” and Newhall School District employed the program for the first time this summer with about 500 summer school students in 19 classrooms at Old Orchard Elementary School. The 10-year-old GLAD program is recognized by the state of California as an effective approach to teaching English-language learners, who make up a significant percent of Newhall’s students.
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The AmerAsian School in Okinawa (AASO) is unique in that it enrolls almost exclusively biracial American-Japanese students, and has developed an original bilingual, bicultural “double” curriculum. Founded in 1998 by five Okinawan mothers, the privately run, K-9 school of 80 students contends that “Amerasian” children have the right to study in both Japanese and English, and aims to secure governmental funding.
Although no official statistics exist, academics estimate that about 250 mixed race American-Japanese children are born every year in Okinawa, the result of the numerous U.S. military bases here. These children, the AASO argues, are often unsuited for public schools, which offer little language support and allow too much discrimination toward racial minorities.
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It’s back to the classroom for English lecturers at various government colleges in the state. Under the project high TEC’ (teaching English through conversation), the commissionerate of collegiate education and the US department of state have organised a training programme to arm teachers with interactive teaching skills and internet know-how.
Notes the Times of India: “It is for the first time that an initiative has been taken to help the government college lecturers in the state. About 184 English lecturers have been inducted under the programme,” said Alka Kumar, programme coordinator.
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