SLICELT - new beginning in teaching Sri Lankan English

Excerpts from the speech of Sunimal Fernando at the opening of the SLICELT at Peradeniya on March 7, by Indian Foreign Secretary Shrimati Nirupama Rao.

"Our journey goes back to that important day in November 2005 when President Mahinda Rajapaksa took his oath as the President of Sri Lanka and announced in his Acceptance Speech that he will take English as a Life Skill to all parts of the country.

"He wanted a radical shift from the failures of the past. He wanted an indigenization, a Sri Lankanisation of English. He wanted the legitimization of 'Sri Lankan English', the social disempowerment of 'British English', the emphasis to be placed on Speaking English rather than on Reading and Writing the language, and a social recognition for Speaking English Our Way with our accent and our manner of pronunciation.

"He saw the urgent need for a radical change in English syllabi and curricula and in the course books used for English teaching in schools, and for Listening and Speaking Skills to be tested at public examinations.

"He ordered a radical shift from the past; a paradigm shift; a new beginning of a new English teaching and learning process to be led from the grassroots by rural English language teachers from Sinhala and Tamil speaking homes, in place of the Anglicised urban teaching elite that had ideologically dominated and misdirected the English teaching enterprise of our country till now.

"Sometime in January 2006, then High Commissioner for India in Sri Lanka Shrimati Nirupama Rao sent us on her own volition a three page draft proposal entitled "Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad, India" - the older name for today's English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), - in which she suggests that "the Sri Lankan Government can explore the possibility of collaborating with this agency for developing educational programs suitable for Sri Lanka."

"It was the auspicious start of a friendly process that has resulted today in the formal opening of the Sri Lanka India Centre of English Language Training (SLICELT).

"Events moved slowly, besieged as we were by our own problems of terrorism and war. It was only on December 12, 2007 that the high powered Joint India Sri Lanka Working Committee for the Development of Education in Sri Lanka was able to hold its first ever meeting in Colombo and formally approve Indian government support for technical collaboration between the Presidential Initiative on English as a Life Skill and EFLU, Hyderabad.

"In January 2008 Vice Chancellor Prof. Abhai Maurya wrote to us to say that EFLU offers its support for establishing an SLICELT and for training Sri Lankan teachers as Master Trainers in Spoken English to deliver spoken English skills to the 22,000 English teachers of our country.

"Thereafter, 40, three month ITech scholarships in 2008 and another 40 in 2009 for the training of Master Trainers in Spoken English through a tailor-made course for Sri Lanka were soon on the cards and the decision to establish the SLICELT was agreed.

'The collaboration and support from India has been translated into practical programs and implemented by the Central and Provincial Ministries of Education. The Education Ministry has used the skills of the 80 Master Trainers trained in Hyderabad to train another 320 Master Trainers. Their present cadre of 400 Master Trainers has trained 4,331 of our 22,000 teachers to deliver spoken English skills to their students. The SLICELT will embark on a program to upgrade the skills of the Master Trainers on a continuous basis.

"The two professors from EFLU working at the Centre, Prof. Nihalani and Prof. Julu Sen have within a short 2 months of their arrival, developed and field tested examination tools for Spoken English testing for application in the GCE Ordinary and Advanced Level examinations as well as in School Based Assessments (SBAs) from Grade six onwards.

"As a result, the Commissioner General of Examinations has recommended last week that the testing of Spoken English skills at public examinations be introduced in Sri Lanka from 2011".