Why in news:

• The State government of Punjab recently organized special training workshop for English teachers from government schools in association with experts from Regional English Language Office (RELO).
• RELO is a wing of the US Embassy in India that was established in 2005 as a part of its Public Diplomacy Section. The project aims to strengthen India-US ties by supporting English learning.

Key Points:

• The development came in the backdrop of the government of Punjab had signing a Knowledge Sharing Agreement (KSA) with the Delhi government.
• RELO is a wing of the US Embassy in India that was established in 2005 as a part of its Public Diplomacy Section. The project aims to strengthen India-US ties by supporting English learning.
• Headquartered at the US Embassy office in New Delhi, RELO’s mission is to “support the effective teaching and learning of English in Afghanistan, Bhutan and India, while enhancing mutual understanding between the US and these countries”.
• RELO collaborates with state government and educational institutions to support them in teacher training, curriculum development and other English language training projects. RELO supports English language training because it strengthens connections between the United States and India, expands access to local and global employment, particularly for youth, and enables access to academic and professional exchange opportunities in the United States.
• For nearly five years now, RELO has already been working in association with the government in Delhi to train English teachers. The Delhi government has now acted as a facilitator in the Punjab government’s recent association with the US Embassy wing.
• In this regard, the Punjab education department conducted its first workshop at PAU Ludhiana in which the experts from RELO interacted with at least 320 English and social studies teachers from government schools.
• According to the Punjab education department officials the collaboration can also help in improving the language learning pedagogy in Punjab.
• Notably, the purpose of the Knowledge Sharing Agreement (KSA) that signed with the Delhi government was to extract best of their practices and implement them in Punjab to improve the health and education systems.
• Since 2017, the US Embassy has been working with the Delhi government for training and capacity building of English teachers. A pool of ‘mentor teachers’ has been created who further continue to train and coach government teachers in Delhi.
• Several batches of teachers in Delhi underwent TESOL Core Certificate Programme (TCCP) offered by the US Embassy, an intensive 140-hour English teacher training programme in which participants learned research-based teaching strategies to make English learning in classrooms better and easier.
• TESOL stands for ‘Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages’. More than 800 teachers from Delhi have undergone training by the RELO for improving their English language teaching skills and bringing creativity in the classrooms. The trained teachers further train their colleagues who interact with students in classrooms.
• According to the senior education department official of Punjab, RELO experts would now be conducting a ‘teacher need analysis’ survey for government teachers in Punjab to assess what kind of programmes would best suit them.
• A formal Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) is now on cards with the US Embassy for training of teachers in Punjab. The language has always been a stumbling block for not just the students, but also teachers, in Punjab, especially in the rural areas. Of all subjects, maximum students fail in English in Class X and XII board exams. It was only in 1999 that English was made a compulsory subject in Punjab government schools from Class I.  Earlier, it started from Class VI. Even then there was no separate cadre to hire English teachers with specialised qualifications. For decades, social studies teachers continued to teach English in Punjab schools.
• Unfortunately, different government in Punjab, for long, did not treat English as a specialised subject and social sciences teachers were given the job to teach English since the beginning, a disastrous practice which is continuing till date in some schools. It was only in 2007 that some 1,000 posts to recruit English teachers for master cadre (Classes Vi to X) were advertised and hiring started for the subject. Some teachers as a result, had also moved court saying that they were being forced to teach English even as they were not qualified for it.