Downing Street Says » English Language

» Thursday, January 17, 2008

English Language

In advance of his visit to China and India, the Prime Minister had today written an article that would be appearing on the Downing Street website. The PMS went on to say that the article was on the subject of the English language and what more we could do to promote the use of the English language worldwide. There were two specific announcements; the British Council would be creating a new website, which would enable anyone that wanted to, to teach themselves English. It would use Voice over Internet Protocol, which enabled one-on-one tuition to take place.

The initial focus for this was on China, with the Government’s starting ambition being to encourage a million hits on the website a month. The Chinese Government had recently decided that English language lessons should be a requirement in Chinese schools from the age of six and there were twenty million children a year that started lessons. So clearly, there would certainly be a big expansion in the use of the English language in China.

The second main announcement was more support for teachers of the English language. The PMS said that the Prime Minister spoke in quite general terms about how people could better use technology to support teachers of English language, but in particular, the British Council would be recruiting what are described as master trainers. These were people who would train other people to teach English and they would be training 750,000 of these master trainers in India over the next five years.

The Prime Minister set out the rationale in some depth for why he thought even further spread of the English language was a good thing. The PMS added that the education sector was an increasingly important sector of the economy for Britain. It currently accounted for about £28 billion worth of exports and was one of the largest export sectors.

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