Teachers to learn Cambridge English

Chennai: It is no more a distant dream for children at corporation schools here to get proficient in the Queen’s English. The Cambridge Univers­ity, shocked by the poor English scores of corporation schoolteachers in a recent assessment, has launched a training programme to help them get better and as a consequence English language skills would improve among their students.

According to a senior trainer with the Cambridge English Lan­g­uage Assessment, a not-for-profit department of the University of Cambridge, the varsity assessment recently showed the Chennai corporation schoolteachers are quite poor in English. “They scored the lowest grades in the assessment. Our aim is to make them improve substantially by the end of February when the training concludes,” he said.

“We are fortunate that the prestigious Cambri­dge University has come to our rescue. Its trainers are already taking English lessons for one hundred of our teachers in this pilot project”, a senior corporation official told DC.

He said the programme started a week ago and focussed on enhancing the teachers’ communication skills in English. Classes will be conducted twice in a week at the corporation girls’ higher secondary school on Rotler Street at Doveton. The teachers would get trained till February and their experience would certainly improve their students’ English, he said.

Commending the initiative, Dr S P Thyagarajan, former vice-chancellor, Madras University, said it was important to convert education into learner-centric from being teacher-centric. And that would mean that instead of the long boring lectures, classrooms should witness robust group discussions and interactive sessions, all of which require good communication skills.

“Most parents now hesitate to admit their kids in corporation schools due to lack of English communication skills among the teachers”, said K. G. Karthikeyan, a software developer. “They should soon queue up for admissions if this Cambridge initiative turns these teachers into masters of English”.