English as a life skill from village to town

A Special Ten Day Training Program is being organized by the Royal College Colombo on the initiative of Principal Upali Gunasekera, to train 35 English language teachers of the school in the delivery of Spoken English Skills to students.

The 80 hour training course will be conducted by the EFLU Hyderabad trained Master Trainers of the Presidential Initiative on English as a Life Skill. All the Master Trainers of the Presidential Program come from Sinhala and Tamil speaking rural homes.

Sri Lanka's new rural Spoken English Experts with cutting-edge teaching tools and methods from the English and Foreign with cutting-edge teaching tools and methods from the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) at Hyderabad, the World's Centre of Excellence for the teaching of English to non-English speaking communities will be trained English teachers of the Royal College to teach Spoken English to students. Professors N.K. Nihalani and Julu Sen of the newly opened Sri-Lanka India Centre for English Langauge Training (SLICELT) will assist in the program.

Secretary to the President Lalith Weeratunga student of Royal will inaugurate the program at 8.30 a.m. on Monday March 15 at the 'Skills Centre' of the school. Presidential Advisor Sunimal Fernando, Coordinator/English and Convenor of the Presidential Task Force on English and IT, also a past student of the school, will be associated with the program. The '47 Group of Royal which has been implementing a Spoken English Initiative in the school with volunteers, and the Western Provincial Education Ministry will also participate in the inauguration.

This program is a part of the Presidential Drive for the empowerment and recognition of Sri Lankan English as a distinct variety of the many 'Englishes' used in the world of today; the disempowerment of British English or the 'Queen's English'; the encouragement and recognition of 'Speaking English Our Way' with our own accent and manner of pronunciation' the discouraging of 'Elocution Culture' that damages the dignity and self- respect of our children by training them to imitate the ex-colonial white man's accent and mode of pronunciation instead of speaking English in a manner natural to Sri Lankans' and taking English to every nook and corner of the country.