Policy Dialogues

Partnership Projects in ELT
Policy dialogues
CSR partnerships
Working with us

speaker abstracts and presentations

Second Policy Dialogue

Conference Report Icon of Adobe Acrobat, image © Adobe Systems

Second Policy Dialogue

English for Progress: Second Policy Dialogue

The British Council India and Sri Lanka organised its English for Progress: Second Policy Dialogue, in Kolkata on November 17 – 18, 2008. This was in continuation of the conversation that started at the launch of Project English at the English for Progress: First Policy Dialogue held in Chennai in November 2007.

The conference objectives were to:

provide an opportunity to address and explore the themes raised at the First Policy Dialogue in Chennai, 2007
highlight progress that has been made in those areas
provide a platform for representatives from the government, academia and industry to raise new issues related to teaching and learning of English for employment and education

The conference was inaugurated by Professor Suranjan Das, the Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University and was attended by over 100 speakers and delegates from India, Sri Lanka and the U.K. as well as British Council colleagues from around the globe. During the conference, there were 28 speeches and presentations on topics and themes that emerged at the First Policy Dialogue in 2007. These themes were as follows:

THEMES DISCUSSED AT SECOND POLICY DIALOGUE

Corporate Sector

State Sector

Testing and assessment   Testing and assessment
Intercultural communication training   Technology platforms for larger numbers
Training corporate trainers   Capacity building in teacher development
and trainer training
Train the gap: Skills profiling
for business processes   Sustainability and scalability: Planning
and implementing large-scale projects
Technology platform for larger
numbers   Reaching and motivating larger numbers
Empowering teachers

The conference deliberations highlighted the need to delve the following issues and questions in the Third Policy Dialogue in 2009:

THEMES IDENTIFIED FOR THIRD POLICY DIALOGUE IN NOVEMBER 2009

Change Management What kind of change management strategies and infrastructure are required to support long-term educational policy changes?
Trainer/teacher educator development Who trains the trainers? And who trains the trainer of the trainers? These are interesting questions to consider in India and Sri Lanka where trainer training is essential in order to reach large numbers.
The role of education Several presenters agreed that it is not the role of school educators to prepare students only for employment. This begs the question, ‘Whose responsibility is it?’ Is there a role for Public Private Partnerships (PPP) in language teacher education? Should literature be central to language teaching?
Access and equity A lack of English is one of the main barriers in the way of accessing opportunities. How can we ensure that all children, including the under-privileged, have access to quality English language education?
Language, identify and English as a Lingua Franca

• Many presenters agreed that non-native speakers are increasingly comfortable with the variety of English they speak
• Do Indian children need to speak an ELF variety of English?
• Is a native speaker variety of English still a valid standard/ benchmark in the state and corporate sectors?
• Should individuals be looking for native speaker models when they choose an English course?

Language pedagogy

• What is the best medium for language teaching?
• What works, what doesn’t?

In 2009, as we enter into another Policy Dialogue, the emphasis on English’s new role as the language of commerce and education. Through Project English, the British Council will continue to forge partnerships and create conversations so that English language becomes accessible to diverse speech communities and is taught well to those who can truly benefit from it.

DCSIMG

Text Only Options

• Change the current font size: larger | default | smaller
• Current color mode is Black on White, other available modes: Yellow on Black | Black on Cream
• Show textual links as buttons
• Do not move navbars
• Do not alert me when leaving text-mode
• Open not handled documents directly
• Hide Text Only Options

Open the original version of this page.