Indian scholarships for Lankan teachers under English as a life skill initiative
Updated - 19/8/2008 - DailyNews.
Indian High Commissioner Alok Prasad will hand-over 40 scholarships to 40 English teachers under the Presidential Initiative ‘English as a Life Skill’ at the Indian Cultural Centre, Bauddhaloka Mawatha at 9.30 a.m. today.
The scholarships will be handed over to the teachers in the presence of the Minister of Education, Susil Premajayanth, the Advisor to the President and Coordinator of the Special Presidential Task Force on ‘English as a Life Skill’ Sunimal Fernando and Secretary to the Ministry of Education Nimal Bandara.
The scholarships have been granted by the Government of India in support of the initiative taken by President Mahinda Rajapaksa to disseminate job oriented spoken/communicative English skills to the youth in all parts of the country.
The 40 teachers will leave on August 28 to participate in a specially designed three month training of trainers course at the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad, which is india’s Centre of Excellence for the teaching of English.
They will be trained in the teaching of job oriented spoken/communicative English. They will return to Sri Lanka at the end of December and undertake the training of English teachers in government schools in their respective provinces in the teaching of job oriented spoken/communicative English which will gradually replace the conventional grammar based teaching of English which is currently followed in our schools.
The 40 scholarship holders were selected to represent all provinces. Four were selected from each province with the exception of the Western, Central and Southern Provinces which are represented by six scholarship holders each.
The Government of India will also be funding the establishment of a Centre of English Language Training (CELT) at Peradeniya in collaboration with the English Unit of the Ministry of Education.
Two Professors from the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) Hyderabad will head the Centre that will train government schoolteachers in batches of 40 in the teaching of spoken/communicative English in our schools.
The Government of India will also gift a fully equipped Digital Language Laboratory with 40 units to the Peradeniya Centre which is scheduled to be opened on January 1, 2009.
Advertisement
RSS Feeds
RSS Feeds
