2009 - Year of ICT and English

Daily Mirror

President Mahinda Rajapaksa has declared 2009 as the year of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and English.
This declaration is not a mere verbal decoration. It is comparable to the green light for a great 365-day voyage in which every citizen of the country is a member of the crew of the ship that is on sail to the destination of a new world of equal and optimum life style and opportunity for all Sri Lankans. Just as much deliberation and minute planning goes into the building of the ship that will take the people on the journey towards the destination, long and short term plans have been in place for this declaration. A cabinet sub-committee on Human Resources Development had recommended it. The organisational structures which were involved with the subject got revamped in advance. The Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) the single apex body involved in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) policy, direction and development for the nation was given a new lease of life. The amending Act No. 33 of 2008 passed in Parliament unanimously rendered ICTA set up in July 2003 by Act No. 27 of 2003 more implementation-friendly. The amending Act also made ICTA’s life span open-ended and not limited just for five years as was the case earlier.

In a further move of emphasizing the importance of the ICT and English language year, two task forces were also set up for carrying out the special tasks in the field of ICT and English language in view of the ICT and English Language Year. The relevant task forces have been doing immense work though in relative silence.

While ICTA has by now made great strides in promoting ICT, it hopes to intensify its efforts even further in the ICT year.

In view of the declaration of 2009 as the year of ICT, the Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) has taken steps to implement an extensive national programme to disseminate among the people awareness about ICT.

These awareness campaigns will be organised in such a way that it will become clear to the people how the benefits of information technology could be used to make their lives more comfortable.

ICTA has planned to launch these campaigns through newspapers, radio and television throughout the whole year. These will be simple and attractive to the target group, which is the general public.

The declaration of 2009 as the year of ICT and English is a great milestone in the Government’s long term plan to make people’s lives more comfortable by the use of ICT. By proper ICT development it is hoped that the Government will be able to earn revenue of two billion US dollars by 2012.

It is further hoped that job opportunities for over 100,000 youths will be made available in the information and communication sector as a result of development in the ICT sector.

Science and Technology Minister Tissa Vitharana in connection with presentation of the ICT Amendment bill in September 2008 said that, “the ICT Agency has laid a platform on which we can develop ICT and I am happy to mention here that His Excellency the President has declared the year 2009 as the ICT Year and the platform is ready for take off in this sector so that our economy can profit by a large number of jobs being created”.

ICT comes under eSri Lanka. The eSri Lanka initiative uses ICT to develop the economy of Sri Lanka, reduce poverty and improve the quality of life of the people. It includes an integrated strategy that encompasses building information infrastructure, creating an enabling environment, developing ICT human resources, modernising the Government and leveraging ICT for economic and social development. Thus eSri Lanka envisions harnessing of ICT as a lever for economic and social advancement by taking the dividends of ICT to every village, citizen and business and re-engineering the way the Government thinks and works.

Mechanism to improve English, IT teaching methods

Dharma Sri ABEYRATNE

Under the national drive of the Presidential Task Force which was established to improve the standard of English and Information Technology of our younger generation, the Education Department together with the Presidential Task Force will launch a mechanism to improve the teaching methods of English and Information Technology at grassroots level based on the methods adopted in India.

Accordingly, 40 teachers who had followed the `Communicative English' scholarship program at the English and Foreign Language University in Hyderabad will be utilized to train other English teachers who are serving at Government schools. The 40 teachers will function as English Language Master Trainers.

"The Education Ministry will release these 40 teachers from school activities to enable them train the other teachers. They will be attached to the Teacher Centres," Advisor to the President, and Project Leader, Information Technology and Communication of the Presidential Task Force, Sunimal Fernando said. Since India is well advanced in the teaching of communicative English and Information Technology sectors, the task force has obtained the assistance of India to improve our teaching methods.

This would help Sri Lankan youths which are lagging behind in the job market as a result of not having a proper knowledge of communicative English. Sri Lanka is grateful to India for training 40 of our teachers in Communicative English and Information Technology.

Course content and course materials are being prepaired by the Indian trained teachers. Finally, the new method goes to the schoolchildren who are badly in need of communicative English, Fernando added.

Indika de Zoysa - Country Business Manager, Intel - INDUSTRY HEADS COMMENT ON PROPOSED ‘YEAR OF IT AND ENGLISH”

"One area we have to look at is how to increase the IT literacy rate. The 2004 census showed the IT literacy rate at 14%, in comparison to the region this is low. It has to be increased, especially in the area of education as this is the future. Also, efforts to increase the IT literacy rate should not be restricted to Colombo. However, this requires a better infrastructure with greater broadband connectivity, WiMAX and 3G availability across Sri Lanka, areas which should also be improved."

INDUSTRY HEADS COMMENT ON PROPOSED 'YEAR OF IT AND ENGLISH"

With the President expected to declare 2009 as the 'Year of English and IT' meeting to discuss the possible way forward for English and IT in Sri Lanka, The Sunday Times FT asked IT industry heads about the real issues in this sector.

Expect their comments.

Vote: Will this (2009 - Year of IT and English) be an effective program or yet another white elephant or a talk shop?

Vote.

Welcome boost for English proficiency

Welcome boost for English proficiency

After decades of painful hair-splitting over an appropriate methodology for teaching the English Language, particularly among the young, the Lankan state has hit on what seems to be a workable, practical solution to the apparently complex problem. As we reported last week, a special state task force headed by Presidential Advisor Sunimal Fernando would be collaborating with the University of English and Foreign Languages in Hyderabad, for inculcating Spoken English or Communicative English skills particularly among our tens of thousands of school- leavers. The principal rationale behind the scheme, as our report indicated, is to enhance and develop the employability of our youngsters because English Language proficiency is chief among those qualifications stressed by foreign entrepreneurs who have opted for Sri Lanka as an investment destination.

As rightly argued by the state, although there is also a great dearth of fully IT-proficient youngsters in Sri Lanka, the inculcation of English Language skills in these persons would help in resolving this problem because English proficiency is a key to IT competence, although suitable IT training too is considered a top priority by the state. The recognition of these dual requirements has, in fact, prompted the state to declare 2009, the Year of IT and English Language Teaching. While the BoI would be collaborating strongly in these initiatives, since it would be in the interests of the investment promotion effort to do so, the co-operation of the local business community too would be sought to bring to fruition the projects, as explained in our report.

Given that youth unemployment is continuing to be a major worry for the state and has proved a sizeable stumbling block to equitable development, we hope this effort at improving the English Language competence of our youngsters would succeed. On the face of it, the English Language teaching methodology which the authorities intend using, is sound and practicable. As pointed out by them, what is basically happening in our primary and secondary schools at present is that the English Language is being taught through, first, a painstaking effort at inculcating in the student a knowledge of grammatical rules and not by instilling in the student an ability to use the language expressively. Sentence construction takes precedence over intelligible use of the language. It is this questionable approach to the teaching of English that generates in the average local student a ‘fear’ of English. It is a very short step from this paralytic’ fear’ to nicknaming English ‘Kaduwa’ or sword.

However, under the scheme to be introduced, effective conversational use of English would take precedence over uninspiring and painstaking learning of grammatical rules. The student would be taught to speak the language first and then given a training in the application of grammar. As rightly pointed out by the authorities, in those Western countries where English is used as a first language, the young student learns to speak in English at home fluently and unaided and it is subsequently in school that he learns the grammar of the language. In the case of Sri Lanka, most students do not use English as a first language. In their formative years they speak either Sinhala or Tamil at home. It is subsequently in school that they get an opportunity to learn some English and that too through an agonising effort to learn grammatical rules at the beginning. Small wonder that the teaching of English has proved a major educational debacle in this country.

Thus we are about to witness a veritable revolution in English Language teaching methodology in Sri Lanka and it is appropriate that we go to India for assistance in this sphere because India has succeeded preeminently in schooling her students in the skills of Communicative or Spoken English, even as she has proved a resounding success in a multiplicity of other fields of human endeavour.

Accordingly, it is in the fitness of things that all relevant sections lend their support to Sri Lanka’s ‘English for Employment’ project which has the worthy objective of ensuring the employability of our young and thereby carries the promise of making a huge dent in the seemingly perennial problem of youth unemployment. As mentioned by Enterprise Development and Investment Promotion Minister Dr. Sarath Amunugama, although some 50,000 youth are targeted by the scheme, 10,000 youngsters proficient in English and IT are immediately needed. This underscores the magnitude of the country’s needs in this regard and we hope the project would receive the desired material and moral assistance.

We need hardly mention that education has proved a playing field for adventurists of numerous persuasions from the time of ‘political independence’. Educational reform, for instance, has really opened the flood gates for experimentation of the most misconceived kind with governments fiercely competing with each other to try out the latest of new-fangled ideas on the young and impressionable. However, the results of these educational jousts and gyrations speak for themselves. Today, we have appallingly low levels of achievement among Ordinary Level students, for example, in Mathematics, English and Science and there is no doubt that efforts by successive governments to reduce these students to the condition of guinea pigs has contributed to these sad misadventures.

Education, no less than other important areas of public life, has been allowed to come under the blanching and withering touch of politicization. This is the reason why successive educational authorities try to outdo each other in what seems to be mindless educational experimentation. However, nothing succeeds like success and in going in for educational projects we have no choice but to be guided by success rates and other positive outcomes of these ventures. In other words, empirical results need to be attached top priority when these schemes are chosen for implementation.

In the case of the ‘English for Employment’ scheme, there is the success achieved by India in the trying out of teaching methodology, to go by. If it has worked in India, there is no reason why it should not succeed in Sri Lanka, since the socio-economic variables applicable are almost identical in both countries.

Therefore, it is incumbent on all sections of our polity to allow our educational authorities to give the initiative a try. Hopefully, a bipartisan approach would be adopted by our political parties towards the project which has the aim of alleviating some of the woes of our youngsters. It must be remembered that it was material deprivation that triggered the bloody youth revolts of 1971 and 1989 in Southern Sri Lanka. Let’s not allow this country to incline in that direction ever again.

Projects to upgrade English and IT skills

Projects to upgrade English and IT skills

by P. Krishnaswamy

The Presidential Task Force on English and IT will now implement far-reaching programs to improve English knowledge and IT skills of our educated youths, said Dr. Sarath Amunugama, Minister of Enterprise Development and Investment Promotion.

The task force of which he is the chairman will also be responsible for the launch of the Year of IT and English in 2009 under President Mahinda Rajapaksa, he said at a media briefing last Friday to elaborate the functions, objectives and vision of the task force.

The BOI would be able to offer 10,000 jobs in the IT sector in the immediate future and the actual target of the task force is the training of 50,000 in English and IT education. "Firstly we will be able to give jobs secondly we will go for science and technology in the country". "We cannot have a modern society unless we have a science and technology based society," he said.

A highly sophisticated IT park in an area of 02 ml.sq.feet, with all modern facilities, will be established soon with Indian collaboration. In the context of the fact that it will be difficult to achieve high skills in IT without adequate English knowledge, the expertise and assistance of the prestigious English and Foreign Languages Institute in Hyderabad will be obtained to teach English through practical and effective new methods, the Minister said.

Presidential Advisor Sunimal Fernando and Executive Director (Investment Promotion) of the BOI Duminda Ariyasinghe who are among the 23 members of the task force and BOI chairman Dhammika Perera were also present at the media briefing.

Members of the task force are very eminent personalities representing the government and private sectors as well as academics who have worked relentlessly to formulate and introduce programmes to improve IT and English skills of the youth to make them competent and gainfully employable, the Minister said. The two sub-sectors under the task force are coordinated by Sunimal Fernando, Advisor to the President (English) and Ranjith Fernando, Project Leader, Information and Communication Technology Agency (IT).

The overall objective of the formation of the task force is to resolve issues related to the thrust skill sector of Information Technology and English education specially targeting the advanced and ordinary level qualified students, who have not been able to enter university, to be employed in the IT/BPO sector.

The Minister further pointed out that although the BOI would be able to offer not less than 10,000 well-paid jobs immediately in the IT sector,' with all maximum efforts under the sun not more than 2000 youths of that calibre could be found, despite the 1000 IT graduates being produced by the SLIIT. The gap is very clear and foreign business entrepreneurs and outsourcing people would not want to come here unless we can produce the required number of employable youths.

He further said:

" Of the average 250,000 students who sit for the GCE (AL) exam, at least 130,000 formally qualify for university admission but only 17,000 get admission due to limitations on availability of seats. Another 10,000 students go abroad for pursuing their university education. About 110,000 youths need jobs. This is the target group which we are trying to address and retrain on a priority basis.

"The state education sector, which is the formal sector, and all recognised private educational institutions, which constitute the informal sector, will work in coordination under five sub-committees for addressing English and IT education.

"Studies have revealed that the Indian method of teaching English has been very effective and the three South Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh have been very successful in imparting standard English knowledge within a span of seven to eight years. So we are seeking their expertise on teaching 'functional English or communicative and focal English'.