According to a DSEL official, spoken English training from the school level will be supportive to the students for their future education and competitive exams.
The Department of School Education and Literacy (DSEL) has planned to introduce spoken English classes for government and aided schools for students of classes 1 to 10 from the academic year 2024-25. The class is expected to take forty minutes every Saturday. Some activities like dialogue, conversation, storytelling, situation explanation, script, role play and experience sharing would be included in it.
This proposal is part of the department’s ‘Educational Guidelines’ of 2024-25 recently issued.
For rural students learning English has been difficult, as well as they need English language skills in order to pass entrance exams like the Joint Entrance Exam – JEE Main for engineering courses or NEET – National Eligibility cum Entrance Test for medical courses admission and CET – Common Entrance Test which are essential in their professional courses as Engineering, Medicine etc. ”Giving Spoken English Training right from school level will be helpful not only for their future education but also preparing them for competitive examinations” said an official of DSEL. “In addition this move will also help raise enrolment in government run schools,” the official added.
Graduate Primary Teachers (GPT) who teach English Language should prepare a spoken English manual that will help students speak fluently in English. Thoroughly During the third period every Saturday, teachers shall address pupils only in English language through-out. It suggests that teachers take classes on spoken English; however, where necessary outside experts may be engaged.
“In Karnataka we have a mega plan with Samagra Shiksha-Karnataka Department of State Educational Research and Training [DSERT] and Regional Institute of Education [RIE] Bangalore from 2024-25 onwards in phased manner to introduce spoken english training right from Class I -X batch by batch… RIE had already devised a spoken english module, which we will follow. But in the beginning stages, the contents of spoken English would be created by the GPT teachers,” she added.
There are 53,782 schools in the State comprising 67,273 government and 6,479 aided schools. Instruction is in both languages at 2,403 schools and only English at 283 schools. Most of the English-medium schools are located in towns and urban areas. The decision of DSEL has been welcomed by a number of educationists who say that this move would help rural children studying at government and aided schools have a chance to learn spoken English.
Dr Niranjanaradhya VP, a development educationist said “This is indeed good – imparting spoken English. However, it is surprising that we still find vocabulary under the title ‘English/Hindi’ as indicated within these educational guidelines document.” This is very amazing indeed. Bilingual Education refers to using Kannada as the mother tongue language while resorting to another language known as L2 (second language) usually being English for Karnataka statestudents on grade seven level. ”This idea may seem like an ideal one but it confuses.”
