Slovaks do not command English, survey shows

THE ABILITY of Slovaks to comprehend English is poor, which is related to the quality of English language teaching at schools. 

(Source: SME)

This stems from the results of a recent Eurobarometer survey and of the survey carried out by British Council Slovensko among 428 English teachers at primary and secondary schools carried out in December 2014.

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In response to these results, the Education Ministry promised to allocate money to support teaching English.

“English is viewed as the most useful language in the world by 67 percent of Europeans and 63 percent of Slovaks [in the Eurobarometer survey],” said Alena Rebrová, director of British Council Slovensko, as quoted by the TASR newswire. “But the ability to comprehend information delivered in this language in the EU is 25 percent on average, while in Slovakia it amounts to a mere 14 percent.”

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The British Council survey suggests that as many as 11 percent of English teachers do not feel confident about their performance in the language.

“There are many passionate teachers, but they lack support in order to provide teaching of a higher quality,” Rebrová said, as quoted by TASR.

She added that 95 percent of the surveyed teachers pointed to a lack of a system involving additional education, while 96 percent said that they lack proper training in making their students more active. Teachers would also like to be more involved in the creation of new textbooks.

In order to remedy the situation, the British Council is launching a campaign entitled ‘The Better English Initiative’, within which English teachers will be able to download teaching resources, for example.

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The Education Ministry also wants to fund projects aimed at making English language teaching better and more effective, Education Minister Juraj Draxler said. He went on to say that a call is being launched for applications for a project that is set to bring digital teaching resources to schools. The ministry will fork out €11.2 million on this, TASR wrote.

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