New language training course by British Council
NEW DELHI: British Council, the United Kingdom’s international organisation for educational opportunities and cultural relations, today announced the launch of Primary Plus – its new course to improve English learning for children aged 6-11 years. The experiential program aims to enhance communication, creativity and leadership skills, helping children become more confident in all walks of life.
Primary Plus will provide children with a chance to interact confidently in English, through speaking, reading, and writing and participating in storytelling, singing, rhyming, games, craft, movement and drama. The method of teaching will encourage freedom of expression during highly interactive sessions in a safe and conducive environment. The classes are designed to be lively, fun and challenging, with teachers motivating children to gain confidence in understanding and using English. The teachers will set exciting projects and tasks to match the kids’ developmental age.
British Council has exclusively partnered with Aardman Animations, to bring these lessons to life with stories of Shaun the Sheep and Friends. The characters are created to capture children’s imagination and deepen their engagement thereby enriching the learning experience. Shaun’s stories will allow children to encounter and learn English in an age appropriate context. An online portal for Primary Plus has also been designed to facilitate learning English at home, with grammar and vocabulary activities, songs and video content that are unlocked when ‘homework’ is completed. This will help parents track their child’s progress at home.
The course will be taught by British Council’s specialists who are world experts in English language teaching. The learning methodology is designed to improve children’s confidence and equip them with 21st century skills through tried and tested approaches, built up over decades of experience.
The teachers will make children to work on exciting projects and tasks that match their mental age and also imbibe the spirit of team work by encouraging them to interact in pairs and small groups to come up with innovative solutions.
This will help them develop essential life skills such as leadership, working together, creativity, critical thinking and problem-solving.
Duncan Wilson, Director – Schools, English and Skills, British Council said, “Today children need 21st century life skills from an early age to develop into successful and confident individuals. Employability in a highly mobile labour market is also an important part of that development. For over 75 years around the world and 70 years in India, the British Council, the world’s English experts,- have been delivering high-quality English courses globally. Our internationally-qualified teachers make learning enjoyable, fulfilling and purposeful for the very young.”
Primary Plus is organised in batches: for children aged 6 to 11 years.
The first batch will begin on 5 January at British Council Delhi Teaching Centre.
The course duration is of eight weeks. The course is priced at INR 11,500. The Birla Institute of Technology and Science, or BITS, Pilani, a science and engineering institute, is seeing alumni pitch in as it seeks to push the envelope on research.
BITS Pilani recently received a world-class electrical machine laboratory as a gift from an alumnus of its Class of 1970. “The lab donated by Kishore Kumar Gupta, who specialises in electronics engineering, will be helpful in conducting curriculum-based experiments for undergraduate and post-graduate students,” said Souvik Bhattacharyya, vice-chancellor of the deemed university.
“It will also help push research into applications of electrical machines in industry. Gupta says this lab is donated as a token of appreciation for the institute that helped him become an entrepreneur.”
The lab contains equipment imported from Germany and Italy and is at par with labs at leading institutes around the world.
“It comes at the right time too, just after we got institute of eminence status from union ministry of human resource development,” said AK Sarkar, director of the Pilani campus.
The institute hopes to push the envelope on research in the fields of technology and science and is actively reaching out to alumni to generate funding for that push.
“We recently launched a Research Endowment Fund or REF of Rs 100 crore that will help provide seed funding to support new faculty and help set up advanced-research labs,” says Bhattacharyya.
Already, the institute’s REF has received $1 million from a Us-based alumni couple. “Alumni engagement is critical for every institute,” Bhattacharyya adds. ‘Leading institutions around the world have started proactively engaging with alumni to contribute in both tangible and intangible ways, and we plan to do the same.”