British Council’s regional English language project, English for Teaching, Teaching for English (ETTE), has significantly enhanced the skills of over 600 teachers to speak and teach through English in seven remote districts of Nepal.

The success has created a great demand for the project from the government stakeholders to continue the programme in the remote and marginalized regions where teachers still do not have access to the trainings and resources to improve their English proficiency.

“Our classroom will be different now. We used to teach English through translation method, now we will teach English through English, and we felt that we are achieving our goals”. This was what, Mrs. Huma Thapa, a ETTE project participant from Baglung district had to say after completing the 112 hours long course and finding the difference in her own performance.

(ETTE) recently completed its second year of training in the districts this year. The training modules were based on the skills acquired through Material Development Workshop held in Almaty, Kazakhstan last year and attended by 5 ETTE trainers from Nepal. The trainers then developed a teacher training course and piloted it in Baglung district in June 2009.

The trainings then took place in remaining six districts covering hilly, mountainous and southern plain regions for 390 primary school teachers. One major achievement this year was the inclusion of government trainers and Resource Persons as trainers which has enabled the project to be sustainable.  

Two teachers from Gulmi district said that they learnt the way English can be learnt and taught. They said that the major achievement had been the confidence in speaking without the fear of making mistakes. When they spoke to Mr. Gnawali, Vice President of, Nepal English Language Teachers Association (NELTA), they spoke in English and visibly they were not at all worried about the mistakes. Their English was not without flaws but they were expressive and fluent.

Mahashram Sharma, Director General, Department of Education during the opening ceremony of training in Baglung said “ETTE Training has given an opportunity for the government school teachers improving their English language. In today’s global competition, English language is a must skill and ETTE training has helped the teachers to teach language in classroom and create English environment. Training like this will help our students to compete in the global context.”

The success of ETTE has its own story of dedication and commitment shown by the trainers. 3 out of the 6 training districts were mountainous regions and flights were the only means of transport. July being the monsoon season caused to continuous flight cancellation and imposed a great challenge to us. When there is a will, they is a way and how true in our case because our trainers walked 2-3 days to reach the training districts.

ETTE partnered with active NGO Global Action Nepal as well as with District Education Offices and NELTA branch offices to implement the training programmes.

One another contributing factor for the success of the project was the way it maintained participants’ enthusiasm throughout the trainings with interactive sessions. One of the participants from Baglung district during the closing ceremony said that “The training session was very effective and creative. We really enjoyed the sessions conducted by our trainers. The classroom management techniques were very helpful and we will apply it in our classrooms.”

The training was appreciated by the stakeholders; District Education Officers (DEO), Chief District Officer (CDO), Local Development Officer (LDO), RP's, local college chiefs and school heads, teacher leaders, social workers, journalists and English teachers and NELTA Committee members.

After monitoring the training very closely in Gulmi (five times during the 14 days training), the DEO proposes to partner with this project and continue next year. New requests have come from DEOs of 3 districts who want to continue the ETTE training in their districts next year and as well as fund the training. This shows that ETTE is also now heading towards sustainability.