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allAfrica.com: Uganda: Rwanda Wants 1,000 English Teachers - 0 views

  • Kampala — RWANDA needs close to 1,000 English teachers following the country's switch from French to English as the language of instruction in schools.Rwanda wants teachers from Uganda and other neighbouring countries to support its switch to English.
  • "The Education Service Commission in collaboration with the ministry of education of Rwanda announced that the government of Rwanda has embarked on a massive recruitment of teachers of English," he wrote. "Teachers (will be sourced) from within and outside Rwanda; including the East African Community region."
  • owever, other sources say English teachers are needed across the country, giving an estimate of between 500 and 1,000 vacancies."ILMI is ready to hire talented instructors to teach English and/or Business English to government officials and business executives in Rwanda," read an announcement on ESL-Jobs, an online jobmart.
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  • Rwanda has accordingly embarked on building the English language teaching capacity of all primary and secondary school teachers by organising and conducting English language training.
  • However, Rwanda's remuneration of teachers is not far better than Uganda's. According to an article published in the New Times, Rwanda's daily newspaper, last year, primary teachers in public institutions earn between Frw20,000 (about sh73,666) to Frw62,000 (about sh228,365) per month depending on their experience.
  • Until October 2008, education in Rwanda was dispensed in a mixture of its three official languages: local Kinyarwanda; French, which is spoken mainly by educated elite; and English, which was added in 1994.
  • Outside major towns, a vast majority speak only Kinyarwanda. Part of the government's rationale for the switch was that it intended to join the Commonwealth club of mainly former British colonies, which it did in late 2009.
Teachers Without Borders

Are schools ready for English? | The Japan Times Online - 0 views

  • While many parents and other Japanese welcome the government's move to provide English education at an early age, some experts are concerned that most teachers are being forced to venture into uncharted waters with little preparation. In addition, devoting just one period a week to English won't be near enough to nurture children's language ability.
  • Japan has lagged behind its neighboring countries in introducing English lessons at an early age, and its impact is obvious in various statistics.
  • TOEFL data for 2004-2005 put Japan next to last in Asia, with an average score of only 191 points — just one point higher than North Korea. Afghanistan exceeded Japan by seven points, while Singapore had the top score at 254.
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  • Education ministry officials stressed that the new English lessons, Gaikokugo Katsudo (Foreign Language Activities), will be different from English lessons at the junior high level, and students won't be drilled on comprehensive grammar rules or vocabulary.
  • The goal of the new program is to help children experience and understand other languages and cultures, motivate them to actively communicate with foreigners and become familiar with the sounds and basic expressions of another language, the ministry says.
  • According to a survey last July and August by the think tank Benesse Educational Research and Development Center on 4,709 elementary school teachers nationwide, 68.1 percent of classroom teachers said they don't have much confidence or they have no confidence in teaching English.
  • The teacher, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said one of his colleagues told him he was afraid of giving lessons with his broken English, while another pointed out the possibility that this will merely cause children to dislike English.
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    Come April, English classes will become mandatory for fifth- and sixth-graders, but a 29-year-old elementary school teacher in Tokyo has heard the concerns of her overwhelmed colleagues, especially the older ones, who have neither taught the language nor studied it since their university years decades ago.
Teachers Without Borders

Vietnam demands English language teaching 'miracle' | Education | Guardian Weekly - 0 views

  • More than 80,000 English language teachers in Vietnam's state schools are expected to be confident, intermediate-level users of English, and to pass a test to prove it, as part of an ambitious initiative by the ministry of education to ensure that all young people leaving school by 2020 have a good grasp of the language.
  • But the initiative is worrying many teachers, who are uncertain about their future if they fail to achieve grades in tests such as Ielts and Toefl."All teachers in primary school feel very nervous," said Nguyen Thi La, 29, an English teacher at Kim Dong Primary School in Hanoi."It's difficult for teachers to pass this exam, especially those in rural provinces. B2 is a high score.""All we know is that if we pass we are OK. If we don't we can still continue teaching, then take another test, then if we fail that, we don't know."
  • "No teachers will be sacked if they are not qualified because we already know most of them are not qualified. No teachers will be left behind and the government will take care of them. But if the teachers don't want to improve, then parents will reject them because only qualified teachers will be able to run new training programmes."
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  • The state media recently reported that in the Mekong Delta's Ben Tre province, of 700 teachers who had been tested, only 61 reached the required score. In Hue, in central Vietnam, one in five scored B2 or higher when 500 primary and secondary teachers were screened with tests tailored by the British Council.
  • "B2 is achievable enough. The teachers I know want to improve their English but want their salaries to be higher so that they can have an incentive to try harder to meet the standard," said Tran Thi Qua, a teacher trainer from the education department in Hue.
  • A new languages-focused curriculum delivered by retrained teachers should be in place in 70% of grade-three classes by 2015, according to ministry plans, and available nationwide by 2019. English teaching hours are set to double and maths will be taught in a foreign language in 30% of high schools in major cities by 2015.
  • "The government needs to fund courses to help improve the quality of the teachers, and pay them more money, but I think if teachers don't want to improve, then they should change jobs," she said.
  • Rebecca Hales, a former senior ELT development manager at British Council Vietnam, said: "The ministry is taking a phased approach, which is commendable, but there are issues with supply and demand. They don't have the trained primary English teachers. The targets are completely unachievable at the moment."
  • "The teacher trainers we trained up are now at the mercy of the individual education departments. There's no evidence at this stage of a large-scale teacher training plan," Hales said.
  • "There are many challenges. We are dealing with everything, from training, salaries and policy, to promotion, how to train [teachers] then keep them in the system. I'm not sure if [Project 2020] will be successful. Other countries have spent billions on English language teaching in the private sector but still governments have been very unhappy with the outcomes."
Teachers Without Borders

Thai schools urged to boost speaking | Education | Guardian Weekly - 0 views

  • The Thai government has embarked on an ambitious nationwide programme to teach English at least once a week in all state schools as part of the new 2012 English Speaking Year project.The initiative is intended to ease Thailand's entry into the Asean community in 2015, when southeast Asia becomes one economic zone and a universal language is required for communication and business.The project will focus on speaking English rather than studying its grammar, with teachers provided training through media modules and partnerships with foreign institutions, including English-language schools, according to Thailand's education ministry.
  • While the ministry aims to incentivise teachers to create an "English corner" in classrooms containing English-language newspapers, books and CDs, the programme is in no way mandatory and will rely instead on a system of rewards. Those who embrace the project may receive a scholarship to travel abroad or be given extra credit at the end of term, Sasithara said.
  • Native speakers will have a role to play in the project, said Sasithara, who expects to start recruiting teachers from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK and US, as well as from countries where a high level of English is spoken, such as Singapore, the Philippines and India.
Teachers Without Borders

English or Konkani: Goa debates on what to use in schools - Times Of India - 0 views

  • PANAJI: Lawmakers and parents in Goa are debating whether English or mother tongue Konkani should be the medium of instruction (MOI) in schools up to Class 8.
  • "The poor are sending their children to English medium schools because they believe that English will propel them to excel in their studies. Why, even the Chinese are learning English. Parents whose students are studying in (English medium) schools run by the Archdiocese (Church) are agitated. Why is the government disbursing grants only to Konkani/Marathi schools?" Godinho said.
  • As per the education department's policy, schools with English as MOI - which includes several privately-run educational institutions and other schools run by the church in Goa - are not entitled to government funding.
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  • "Is Konkani only for the poor to study? Let the parents be given the choice (of deciding which MOI to choose)," Godinho said, with legislators from the ruling Congress backing his demand.
Teachers Without Borders

Haitian Teachers Revive Community and Rebuild Education | IREX - 0 views

  • When the only Haitian public teacher training institute collapsed in Port-au-Prince as a result of the earthquake, the once sparse availability of professional development opportunities for Haitian teachers became non-existent. Understanding the importance of continuous teacher training, Fanfan Joseph, an English teacher and President of the English Club of Cap-Haitien, organized a four-day training workshop for 50 English teachers in Cap-Haitien. Focusing on lesson planning, reflexive teaching, and cooperative learning techniques in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom, Joseph trained participants on practical skills that they could use in their classrooms immediately. The participants of this workshop celebrated Joseph’s efforts and encouraged him to organize another workshop, which he promptly did. This September, Joseph’s follow-on workshop focused on skills for effective teaching and learning in large classrooms. Teachers around the world struggle with large class size; a typical school in Haiti can include as many as 250 students in one classroom. The participants in Joseph’s workshops represent many different schools across northern Haiti, and each of them teaches hundreds of students. As a result of Joseph’s workshops, thousands of students across northern Haiti are engaged in interactive classrooms with teachers who have benefited from this recent and relevant training.
  • Another English teacher, Abel Mercier of Port-au-Prince, recognized that one of the most important things children need during times of crisis is the permission and space to have fun. “The secret to coping with post-traumatic stress in a community after an event such as the earthquake is to promote recreational activities among the children, teenagers, and adults,” says Mercier. This summer, Mercier organized a “Day of Fun” for over 80 high school students from Lycée Cité-Soleil in Port-au-Prince, the capital city that was hardest hit by the earthquake. Students gathered at the beach for a stress-free day of sports, arts, games, and more. By including a short workshop on the geological forces that cause earthquakes, and another on understanding the effects of psychology trauma, Mercier elevated his “Day of Fun” to a meaningful experience for a community in the midst of recovery.
  • Jovenal Thomas, another English teacher from Cap-Haitien, collaborated with Red Cross volunteers to deliver CPR training to high school students. “There is no Civil Defense Warning Program here, no 911 telephone number to call, limited ambulance service and very little access to medical treatment,” says Thomas. “Students need to be trained to deal with emergencies when they encounter them.”
Teachers Without Borders

Jobs galore for Kenyan teachers as Rwanda seeks tutors  - News |theeastafrica... - 0 views

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    Rwanda is planning to hire at least 4,000 teachers from the East African Community this month, opening an employment window for thousands of unemployed teachers in the region. The move is part of plans to scale up the use of English as the language of instruction in schools as well as increase its use in the largely French-speaking economy, as it seeks opportunities in the integrated EAC where English is the formal language of communication.
Teachers Without Borders

ESL teachers about to become hot commodity - 0 views

  • Her specialty - teaching English as a second language - is about to become an even hotter commodity in Quebec.The Education Department plans to expand intensive English in Grade 6 to all French public schools over the next five years. It predicts about 1,235 extra teachers will be needed to teach those classes.
  • A normal teaching workload is 300 to 400 students, said Lise Winer, a professor in second language education at McGill University's Integrated Studies in Education department."You have 10 classes and you see them for 75 minutes twice in a nine-day cycle. It's just hard to keep track of things," Winer said.
  • The Education Department believes that with the expansion of intensive English more students will be drawn to the field because the new positions will be more attractive. In intensive English classes, teachers typically work with the same group of students for a semester as opposed to juggling many classes.
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  • Because of Bill 101,the French Language Charter, intensive English classes in French schools can't involve instruction in other subjects like mathematics and science.
Teachers Without Borders

In Battle to Save Chinese, It's Test vs. Test - China Real Time Report - WSJ - 0 views

  • Chinese students’ obsession with learning English is apparent. Chinese cities are littered with billboards and fliers for teaching institutes, and the demand for native-speaking teachers and tutors seems endless. For many, the TOEFL, or Test of English as a Foreign Language, ranks second only to the infamous gaokao college entrance exam as a driver of candle-burning study habits. Worried that this preoccupation with English is contributing to a decline in native language skills, officials at the Ministry of Education are now trying to get students to return to their linguistic roots. How? By introducing another test.
  • The test comes amid worrying signs of declining language proficiency in China. More than 30% of students failed a ministry-sponsored test administered last year to evaluate Beijing college students’ language skills, according to Xinhua. Many language instructors and others worry that young people in China are neglecting their mother tongue as technological advances like cellphones and computers have greatly reduced the need to hand-write Chinese characters — of which there are tens of thousands.
  • “In recent years, more and more Chinese people are paying attention to foreign-language studies while neglecting to polish their native language,” Dai Jiagan, director of the authority overseeing the exam, told Xinhua. “And many newly coined, nonstandard Internet phrases are confusing their Chinese.” There are around 300 million Chinese people learning English, China’s premier Wen Jiabao boasted in a 2009 speech. Last year, ETS, the creator of the TOEFL, said it saw a 30% increase year-to-year in the number of Chinese test takers.
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  • McKinsey & Co. estimates that China’s foreign-language business is worth $2.1 billion annually
Teachers Without Borders

allAfrica.com: Rwanda: Wanted - 4,000 English Teachers - 0 views

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    The Ministry of Education will recruit 4,000 teachers to teach in the English language in secondary schools, as part of its strategy to put the country at the same level with its EAC partners of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in creating higher education and job opportunities. In an exclusive interview with The New Times, the State Minister-in-charge of Primary and Secondary Education, Dr Mathias Harebamungu, said the recruitment will be done in January 2012 to coincide with the new academic year.
Teachers Without Borders

Experts Tackling Education in Africa | Africa | English - 0 views

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    How do you fix education in Africa, where students have far fewer opportunities than their counterparts in other parts of the world? There are two schools of thought on the subject: do you invest bottom up? Or top down? The statistics are hard to ignore.  Sub-Saharan Africa is the lowest-ranked region in the world on the United Nations' education development index. The U.N. education agency (UNESCO) says a quarter of all children in sub-Saharan Africa do not go to school, and account for 43 percent of the world's out-of-school children. Meantime, the African Union (AU) has said the continent will need to recruit more than 2 million new teachers by 2015, just three years from now. While the U.N. and the AU agree on the scope of the education challenges facing the continent, they are from two separate schools of thought on how to remedy the situation.
Teachers Without Borders

Namibia's language policy is 'poisoning' its children | Education | Guardian Weekly - 0 views

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    English has been the medium of instruction in most of Namibia's classrooms for nearly 20 years, but with teachers shown to be failing in competency tests, calls for change are mounting
Cara Whitehead

Educational Standards Correlations - 0 views

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    VocabularySpellingCity provides the following sets of correlations to standards: U.S. Standards by State Common Core Standards for each States' Implementation Australian Standards by State Canadian Standards by Province English National Curriculum Standards
Teachers Without Borders

Africa Faces Surge of Secondary School Students | Africa | English - 0 views

  • Africa’s educational systems are suffering from growing pains.  More students than ever are enrolling in school, but the supply of teachers and infrastructure have not kept up with demand. Educators say about 80 percent of African students are completing primary school -- thanks in part to the push to meet the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. They call for universal primary education by the 2015. John Daniel, the president and CEO of the intergovernmental organization the Commonwealth of Learning, says success is bringing more challenges. SCOPESecondary school students at KwaMhlanga High School in Mpumalanga, South Africa. “The African countries achieved in 10 years what it took many developed countries 100 years to do two centuries ago," he said, "and they don’t have many resources left over to do secondary.”
  • “Girls who have secondary education … have on average worldwide one-point-eight fewer children than girls who don’t," he said. "That’s a difference of two or three billion to the population of the world by 2050. There is [one educational researcher, Joel Cohen] who says therefore girls’ education is best way of stopping population growth and climate change.”
  • The Commonwealth of Learning proposes open schools, using new technologies and new ways to meet the needs of school aged children, drop-outs, mothers who want to learn at home and working adults. He said the schools cut costs and save time by using new technologies, including cell phones. Secondary school curricula can be created and shared among schools without costly intellectual property rights.
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  • That’s exactly what’s happening in a project involving six Commonwealth countries that develop and share course materials – Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Seychelles, Zambia and Trinidad and Tobago.
  • Some secondary schools in Africa are considering the use of cell phones to reach students who cannot attend traditional classroom lectures.  Instead, they can listen to lessons sent by voicemail and even take tests by phone.
Teachers Without Borders

Students offer info about post-quake efforts in 22 languages - AJW by The Asahi Shimbun - 0 views

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    Twenty students at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies have produced a multi-lingual website about areas hit by the Great East Japan Earthquake. The site, called Tohoku10×26windows, gives information on the activities of 10 groups based in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures and offers translations into 22 languages, including English, German, Vietnamese and Polish. Pages in Czech, Burmese, Urdu and Arabic are in the pipeline, which will bring the total languages to the title's "26 windows." "We aim to transmit the news directly from the disaster areas to the world," said one student involved in the project.
Teachers Without Borders

UNESCO IITE | Publications | "Open Educational Resources in Brazil: State-of-the-Art, C... - 0 views

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    The book "Open Educational Resources in Brazil: State-of-the-Art, Challenges and Prospects for Development and Innovation"(author - Andreia Inamorato dos Santos)  has been out of print. This is the second IITE publication within the series of case studies summarizing best practices of OER development in non-English-speaking countries. The study contains an overview of the Brazilian educational landscape, national educational policy and the strategies of ICT use in education. The author describes existing open digital content repositories with due emphasis on the copyright situation and considers several examples of successful international OER projects which involved Brazilian partners. The book is destined for those who study OER initiatives and projects on a national scale as well as promotion of OER movement worldwide. 
Teachers Without Borders

allAfrica.com: East Africa: Uganda to Teach Swahili in Schools - 1 views

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    Uganda will introduce Kiswahili as a compulsory subject in primary and secondary schools this year as a way of integrating fully with the other EAC partner states. Uganda joins Rwanda in the list of regional countries seeking to boost their language use as they seek opportunities in the integrated EAC where English and Swahili are the main languages of communication.
Teachers Without Borders

Education Week: Spotlight on Professional Development - 3 views

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    The Education Week Spotlight on Professional Development is a collection of articles hand-picked by our editors for their insights on: Using social media and networking for professional development New guidelines for teacher learning Integrating face-to-face and online professional development Using classroom visits to learn best practices from peers Supporting teachers to meet the needs of English-language learners You get the nine articles below and a resource guide in a downloadable PDF.
anonymous

Programs in TESOL | Education Futures | Scoop.it - 0 views

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    Programs in TESOL provide you with the skills to teach English to speakers of other languages.  Find out more about these programs, especially online certificates and masters TESOL programs.
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