By Dipankar De Sarkar, IANS
London : British Prime Minister Gordon Brown left on tour of India and China Thursday after announcing a global English teaching initiative aimed primarily at Chinese students, with India as its hub.
The move to help two billion people learn English by 2020 appeared as much aimed at projecting English as the language of globalisation, as a friendly gesture to India and China.
And it was a calculated snub to Russia.
Announced on a day when Britain closed down the offices of the British Council in Russia amid spiralling diplomatic spat, Brown said the initiative would be run from a website to be set up by the British Council.
Brown said the new Internet project would vastly expand the teaching of English and allow people worldwide to make use of a form of one-to-one tuition using Internet telephony systems.
The plan included the recruitment of “master trainers” in India to train up to 750,000 English teachers in five years. He said it would be aimed first at China and initial hopes were for it to get one million hits a week.
Announcing the initiative, the British premier said no-one “however poor, however distant” should be denied the chance to learn English and his aim was for at least one billion more people worldwide to have access to teaching materials within 10 years.
The British Council would set up the new website, which would offer one-to-one tuition through VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol), which allows people to make free phone calls over the Internet.
The British Council will spearhead the recruitment drive in India, with the aim of training up 750,000 teachers in five years to work with public and private bodies to improve English for Indians.
He said he hoped it would be used by people in “schools, cities and even remote places on every continent”.
Brown also hoped to persuade more telephone, telecom and other broadcasters to make more English lessons available through various channels.
“With more teachers, with more courses, more websites and now a deal involving the publishing media and communications industries, we will open up English to new countries and new generations,” he said.
He said he hoped to make English the “world’s common language of choice”.
“In total, two billion people worldwide will be learning English by 2020. But there are millions more on every continent who are still denied the chance to learn English,” he added.