ELT World » iraq Your local friendly TEFL blog Fri, 04 Jun 2010 05:32:55 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 Iraq and United States: Strike Brigade Delivers English School Books /2008/09/iraq-and-united-states-strike-brigade-delivers-english-school-books/ /2008/09/iraq-and-united-states-strike-brigade-delivers-english-school-books/#comments Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:48:51 +0000 david /news/?p=134 With a new school year approaching, Multi-National Division – Baghdad Soldiers from the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), are reaching out to the schools in northwest Baghdad as part of a School Partnership Program. The Strike Brigade began the program as part of a way to build educational capacity within northwest Baghdad through communication and donations of English school books and supplies. They gathered more than 10,000 English language teaching aids and supplies as donations to the Ministry of Education in northwest Baghdad.

Read the full story…

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]]> /2008/09/iraq-and-united-states-strike-brigade-delivers-english-school-books/feed/ 0 ELT reconstruction in post-invasion Iraq /2007/06/elt-reconstruction-in-post-invasion-iraq/ /2007/06/elt-reconstruction-in-post-invasion-iraq/#comments Fri, 08 Jun 2007 06:26:00 +0000 david /2007/06/638/ Ala’ Hussein Oda surveys the task of ELT reconstruction in post-invasion Iraq

Teaching English in Iraq has undergone drastic changes since the fall of the former regime. The first in a series of eight textbooks, The New English Course for Iraq, was published in 1973. The New English Course established the audio-lingual method of teaching that has been in use in Iraq ever since.

In 2000 there was an ambitious project to shift from the audiolingual age to the communicative approach with a new series called Refidain English Course for Iraq. Unfortunately, only two books were published, in 2002 and 2003, for the fifth and sixth grades of primary school. The result of the partial introduction of Refidain English has been to open a gap between what students study at primary school and at secondary stage, where course work is still based on the audio-lingual method.

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Learn more about teaching English in the Middle East at Teaching English in the Middle East.
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Students are therefore in a real mess. They study English according to the communicative approach for two years only and then move to audio-lingualism for six years. Teachers of English find it difficult to cope with the communicative approach because they have had no effective training.

So ELT in Iraq faces the twin problems of textbooks and training. The task of introducing the communicative approach into the rest of the school system would make a major demand on education budgets and require training for teachers, but the people in charge of the ministry of education do not seem to be aware of the problems.

Read the rest of the article at the Guardian Weekly.

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