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Iraqi Teachers Head to Kurdistan For
English
22.2.2007 |
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February 22, 2007
Matt Salisbury talks to Kurdish Ministers - English
Language Gazette, March 2007
A new English language American University in Iraq
is planned – but not for Baghdad.
It will be based in the outskirts of Sulaimaniyah, a
city in the comparatively safe Kurdish-controlled
'Kurdistan region' in the north, which is seeing and
expansion of ELT.
In an interview for the ELGazette the Kurdistan
Regional Government higher education minister Dr
Idriss Hadi Salih said a charter had been awarded
for a Sulaimaniyah-based private American University
to be opened ‘next year or the year after’.
The university aims to reverse the brain drain of
Iraqi intellectuals. It will be part-funded by $10.5
million (L5.32 million) from US agencies – believed
to be the biggest donation for an Iraqi educational
project. Teaching will be in English. It aims to
specialise in IT and engineering, but will open with
a small intake for intensive foundation English
courses in the spring.
The American institution will follow the region’s
first English-language university, the Kurdistan
University Hawler, already running foundation
English courses accredited by the University of
Bradford. Science, maths and medicine at state-run
Kurdish universities are now switching to teaching
in English.
The expansion of the sector has led to a shortage of
university teachers. The ministry now runs
scholarships ‘for the significant amount of teachers
from Baghdad’ moving to the safety of Kurdistan ‘for
security reasons’.
There is a special programme to fill posts with
teachers from other parts of Iraq with a good enough
standard of English to teach Kurdish-speaking
university students who don’t speak Arabic. Dr
Salih, predicted that continued expansion of the
university sector would fuel the teacher shortage.
Minister for primary and secondary education Dilshad
Abdul-Rahman said, ‘we receive 10 teachers a day’
who are ‘seeking refuge’ from Baghdad. Kurdistan
takes primary and secondary teachers and pays their
salaries for ‘humanitarian reasons’. They can’t use
these teachers because they can’t teach in the
Kurdish language.
Kurdistan is introducing an overhauled
English-language school curriculum, assisted by
Macmillan, which has an office in the regional
capital Erbil. A staggered system introduces the new
curriculum one school year at a time. Books 7 and 8
– the first and second year of secondary school –
are ready, as is the material for six-year-olds in
the first year of primary school.
The Macmillan programme includes cascading training
and training for trainers, but there is still a
shortage of English teachers and a dire shortage of
school buildings, with some urban schools teaching
in three shifts.
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