Tunisia launches English language teaching reform project – Middle East Online
Tunisian Ministry of Education signs MoU with British Council for huge English language teaching project.
By Mamoon Alabbasi – LONDON
The Tunisian Ministry of Education and Training signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the British Council in London Tuesday, to prepare for a huge project aimed at English language teaching reform in all state primary and secondary schools in Tunisia.
The MoU signing ceremony was attended by Hatem Ben Salem, the Tunisian Minister of Education and Training; and Lord Kinnock, Chair of the British Council and former Leader of the Labour Party.
Read the complete news item: http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/features/?id=29798
Teaching fluency: Area teachers aim to break down language barriers – LSJ.com
Aland Mustafa carefully colored in the pictures before him on the table in the kindergarten classroom at Lansing’s Riddle Elementary School.
“Mittens on a bed,” read the words below one picture.
“Mittens on a sled,” read words under the other.
Aland doesn’t have a sled.
“I have a bed,” he said with a grin. “For sleep.”
At the age of 7, Aland already speaks Kurdish and Arabic. Now, he’s one of more than 1,100 kids in the Lansing School District who are learning the English language along with their daily lessons in math, science, reading and more.
Read the complete news item: http://www.lansingstatejournal.com/article/20090115/NEWS05/901150348/1006/NEWS05
Teachers struggle to teach in English – Daily Yomiuri Online
By Shoichi Yamashita and Akihiko Kano / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writers
The Education, Science and Technology Ministry unveiled late last month a draft version of new teaching guidelines for high schools, requiring for the first time that English classes, in principle, should be taught in the language. With the revised guidelines to be implemented in 2013, the proposed policy has been causing anxiety for many English teachers.
Some schools have already been trying to teach their English classes in the language, with Yamato-Nishi High School in Yamato, Kanagawa Prefecture, as one such example.
When The Yomiuri Shimbun visited a recent class for second-year students, Ryoji Murakoshi, 43, placed photographs of a bat, a leech and a mosquito on the blackboard, before asking: “Which are you the most familiar with?”
Read the complete news item: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/features/language/20090115TDY14001.htm
“Winnie the Pooh to make a comeback” / Teaching Material for the English language by the author Sean Banville – TeachersNews
For Free Download this week the lesson on “Winnie the Pooh to make a comeback” / On the website www.BreakingNewsEnglish.com you can find lessons ready-to-use for English as a Second Language teachers and English as a Foreign Language teachers. Each week you can find several new lessons at two different levels.
All lessons are based on stories currently in the news. The lessons are downloadable in Word.doc and PDF formats. Classroom handouts are readily reproducible and teachers can easily copy and paste the parts of the lessons they want to use. Listening files can be downloaded in mp3 format or subscribed to via a podcast.
Read the complete news item: http://www.teachersnews.net/artikel/sek__i/englisch/010048.php
English takes hold in Afghanistan – BBC News
Impoverished Afghanistan is slowly reopening itself to the world and English has become the key.
Hundreds of private English-language schools, with tens of thousands of students, are mushrooming all over Afghanistan.
An explosion in English language studies, fuelled by the growing dominance of American culture and the financial realities of globalisation, is unprecedented in a country which is thousands of miles away from the nearest English-speaking nation.
Read the complete news item: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7493285.stm