A new education bill was approved by the Slovak parliament on Wednesday, September 22. It was passed in the form proposed by Education Minister Eugen Jurzyca on September 13, following reservations about its wording expressed by the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH) in a previous parliamentary debate.
The approved bill states that one of the obligatory foreign languages taught in Slovak elementary schools must be English. However, it will probably not be taught from the very beginning, as was first proposed, but rather from the 3rd grade onwards (another foreign language will then be taught from the 5th grade). The grade is not specified in the amendment. Jurzyca intends to change the public education programme so that the English language becomes obligatory for 3rd-graders as early as September 2011, the SITA newswire wrote. He said it would be possible to increase the amount of English taught at schools and to find enough English teachers, as the amount of English teaching will increase by just 20 percent. Several years ago the amount of English in elementary-school curricula was abruptly increased by 300 percent, and the ministry managed to secure enough teachers, so the currently proposed change should be manageable, Jurzyca noted.
Source: SITA
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
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