Jagan's English medium initiative reaps benefits; ZPHS Bendapudi school converse with CM in English

Amaravati: Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S Jagan Mohan Reddy has, for the past three years, focused heavily on English medium teaching and curriculum. The result of this initiative was seen when students from the ZPHS Bendapudi school in Kakinada district fluently conversed with the Chief Minister in English about various issues, including the schemes rolled out in the state, during the review meeting of the education department held on Thursday in Tadepalli.

The students – Myra, Karishma, and Anudeep – explained how they would like become IAS officers and that learning English has benefitted them and motivated them to achieve their goals. Busting the myth of how learning English could make you stupid as claimed by former CM Chandrababu Naidu, the student's mentor and teacher, Prasad, trained his students in English for the past few months just by making them watch videos on the internet and correcting their grammar and pronunciation, said Jagan.

At the ZPHS government school in Kakinada district, Prasad started a speakers' club where interested students would watch educational videos in English and their pronunciation and grammatical errors would be corrected. "There is an influence of native language and hence the accent and pronunciation are different. Once I started the club, many students have started to pick up the accent and prefer speaking in English than their mother tongue," Prasad said.

The state government is preparing an SOP in line with the procedure followed by Prasad to teach and make the students confident, said Jagan. "The students should be taught sophisticated English. That is what will make them more confident when they face the outside world. An SOP should be prepared to ensure the quality of education is improved and the right method of teaching English is incorporated," the CM instructed the officials.

Google Read Along app

To improve the learning experience of the students, the state government has partnered with Google to launch an app – Google Read Along – to aid students in grasping the right pronunciation of words, learning new words every day, and also read and speak fluently in English.

Learning Achievement Survey 2022

The state government, to assess the impact of COVID-19 on students, conducted the State Learning Achievement Survey 2022. The survey was conducted on 21 April across 3,788 schools and 1.4 lakh students in classes 4, 6, and 8. The data is now being analysed to see the impact of the pandemic on students and how that can be tackled.

In addition, the state government launched Learning Improvement programme (LIP), a summer workshop for students where alumni, teachers, and parents will come together and help students to cope up with the curriculum.