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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.

"The percentage of people who speak French fluently is about 5%, and 100% speak Creole," says Chris Low. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote It's like a toddler who is forced to start walking with a blindfold” End Quote Michel DeGraff Associate Professor of Linguistics at MIT "So it's really apartheid through language."

He argues that French should be taught in Haiti as a second-language - after children have learnt basic literacy skills in Creole. "Learning to first read and write in a foreign language is somewhat like a toddler who is forced to start walking with a blindfold, and the blindfold is never taken off," he told the BBC World Service.

No matter which indicators you pick, Haiti has an appalling record on education. One recent report rated it as the third worst place in the world, after Somalia and Eritrea, to go to school. Continue reading the main story A brief history of Haitian Creole It emerged towards the end of the 18th Century as slaves from Africa began mixing African languages with French Lots of the vocabulary comes from French, but the grammar is quite different Spelling was standardised in 1979 A law called the Bernard Reform was introduced in the early 1980s, designed to boost Creole in schools The 1987 constitution states that French and Creole are both official languages in Haiti It's estimated that about one-third of children never enrol at primary school, and only about one in 10 complete secondary school.

MAKAMBA, 24 February 2011 (IRIN) - Unversed in Burundi's official languages of French and Kirundi, children of refugees returning after decades spent in Anglophone countries, such as neighbouring Tanzania, often find it difficult to continue their studies and some drop out.

To ensure such students continue learning, a group of returnee teachers has set up an education centre in the commune of Mabanda in Makamba Province, near Tanzania. The teachers work without pay. "We couldn't just sit back while our children faced a lack of education due to a language barrier," Norbert Bitaboneka, the principal, told IRIN. Swahili and English are the languages of instruction at the facility, the Centre Prévisionnel de l'Afrique de l'Est (East African Planning Centre), in line with the Tanzanian curriculum. The language of instruction in Burundian schools is French.

Most of the returnee students affected by the language barrier are those whose parents fled Burundi during civil war in 1972.

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."

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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A group of South African Indian teachers have asked the Education Ministry to recognise five Indian languages Hindi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati and Telugu as optional third language in the school curriculum. The five main mother tongues of South African Indians will die out completely in 50 years if they are not taught as formal school subjects, the teachers said.

Indian education has often been criticized for focusing on rote learning rather than problem solving. Experts say the curriculum in most schools is outdated and disconnected from the actual world.

Randeep Kaur, education adviser at Plan India, a New Delhi-based children’s organization, said most Indian students learned only with the aim of scoring marks but never with the intention of understanding and enhancing their knowledge. “How many of them (students) can actually make use of what they had learned?” she asked.

The new program of study, called the CBSE-i will put less emphasis on methods such as memorization and greater focus on developing analytical and communication skills.

Teachers in Zurich are to receive a language handbook with vocabulary and basic information about the 14 main immigrant languages to help ease communication. With one in three students coming from foreign-language homes, the manual is designed to help in situations such as parent-teacher meetings as well as in German language classes.

Asked at the start of their first Chinese class what motivated them to take up the language, the students of the Institut de la Providence, a secondary school outside Namur in Belgium, give their new teacher varied answers. “It’s a big country,” says one. “I’ve been to China and would like to go back,” ventures another. The two dozen teenagers are part of a pilot project started this autumn in nine Belgian schools to promote Chinese language learning. More broadly, they are among hundreds of thousands of students in the West who are opting to learn Mandarin Chinese, often at the expense of traditional languages such as Spanish or German.

China’s rapid economic rise is gradually translating into a greater presence in European and U.S. classrooms, from a very small base as recently as 10 or 15 years ago.

From a marginal position 15 years ago, Chinese has imposed itself as the fourth major language behind French, Spanish and German, which, on current trends, it will overtake by the end of the decade.

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.

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.