ELT World News

Arizona: Schools Moving Forward With ELL Program

The Vail School District is moving forward with implementing the English Language Learner program for the 2008-09 school year, as mandated in a court battle that started in 1992.

Under the state mandate, starting next year, all Arizona schools will be required to teach four hours of English a day to students who aren’t proficient in the language.

Calvin Baker, the district superintendent, said implementing the program is definitely not as simple as it sounds, and there are still a lot of unknowns surrounding the issue.

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Filipinos Relearn English from Peace Corps Volunteers

Using songs she herself had written, a 25-year-old American Peace Corps volunteer is teaching high school students how to speak good English.

The Peace Corps volunteers in the Philippines say they are simply serving as “catalysts” in the combined effort by the government, the private sector and international agencies to improve an ailing public education system. Specifically, they say they are devising ways with Filipino counterparts to improve the country’s proficiency in English, its second language.

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Japan:Professor sets high goals for business English

For Japanese businesspeople to carry out their duties in English, they should ultimately aim for English skills equivalent to at least 900 points out of 990 on the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC)–a near-native speakers’ level–a group of researchers has proposed, based on a survey of more than 7,300 businesspeople.

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India: English Medium Classes Begin Amid Outcry

The government on Thursday commenced English medium from class VI with Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) syllabus in 6,500 high schools in rural areas as a new experiment amid criticism against launching the scheme without proper trained teaching staff.

At a press conference here on Thursday, School Education Minister C. Damodar Rajanarsimha and Principal Secretary C. B. S. Venkata Ramana justified the experiment on the ground that it would offer convent-type English medium education to the children of the poor, making them fare better in life.

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Hong Kong:The Cat Got Your Mother Tongue?

It was an admission of cultural defeat; but then Hong Kong is nothing if not pragmatic about such things. On June 6th its education minister, Michael Suen Ming-yeung, lifted restrictions that forced four-fifths of the territory’s more than 500 secondary schools to teach in the “mother tongue”, ie, Cantonese, the main language of its residents and of southern China. Schools may switch to English, the language of the former ‘colonial oppressor’, from next year.

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Brunei Darussalam: Teaching Reading Workshop Receives Positive Feedback

The Department of Schools at the Ministry of Education yesterday organised a Teaching Reading Workshop, where 30 Form 1 teachers from schools in the Brunei-Muara District learnt various strategies, tools and techniques that could be used in the classroom to enhance reading in the English language.

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United Kingdom: English Children Can’t Read English

In the country that gave birth to the English language, one in five 11 year olds can’t read and have failed to master mathematics.

The United Kingdom’s chief schools inspector, Christine Gilbert, warned last month that these children could be on the educational scrapheap at 16 — unemployed and pursuing no further training. Gilbert said: “If education in England is going to compare favorably with the best in the world, standards need to improve. In fact they have stalled. We have said so in our documentation. We need to accelerate improvements and we are looking at ways of doing that.

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Korea: For English Studies, Koreans Say Goodbye to Dad

On a sunny afternoon recently, half a dozen South Korean mothers came to pick up their children at the Remuera Primary School here, greeting one another warmly in a schoolyard filled with New Zealanders. The mothers, members of the largest group of foreigners at the public school, were part of what are known in South Korea as “wild geese,” families living separately, sometimes for years, to school their children in English-speaking countries like New Zealand and the United States.

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Vietnam: Billions VND for Children’s Education

Nguyen Ky Nam, PhD, of Australian nationality, has noted that when he returned to Vietnam in 2006, he spent a lot of time choosing a school for his son, Ky Anh, who had finished the first class in Australia. Nam wanted his son not only to speak English fluently and understand foreign cultures, but also speak Vietnamese fluently and understand Vietnamese culture.

Mr. Nam finally decided to send his son to Uniworld on Van Bao street where he can follow a bilingual syllabus (lessons are taught in English in the morning and Vietnamese in the afternoon).

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Teen ESL results better than ever in canada

Canada: Teen ESL Results Better Than Ever, Province Says

Teens learning English as a second language are passing the provincial literacy test at higher rates than ever. The test, written in March and graded only as pass or fail, determines if students have the reading and writing skills they’re supposed to have gained by the end of Grade 9. Passing the test or a literacy course considered equivalent is required for graduation.

The biggest success story has been among English-language learners. In 2003, the first year the test was administered, only 23 per cent passed, with 40 per cent deferring it for a year. The deferral rate has now dropped to 33 per cent, while the pass rate has shot up to 38 per cent.

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