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Manama: First-year pupils in all government schools in Bahrain will start to learn English from next year.
"We have already implemented the English programme in 83 primary schools and we are pleased with the results. We will expand it to all schools from next year," Education Minister Majid Al Nuaimi said on Wednesday as he chaired a meeting to review steps to enhance curricula in public schools.
Bahrain has embarked on an ambitious programme to improve its school curricula after parents repeatedly complained of the growing discrepancies between private and public schools, mainly in the fields of sciences and languages.
Requests
"We have received several requests from parents to offer a general English programme in the first year, especially seeing that initial results from experiments in specific schools have been highly positive," Al Nuaimi said.
Other plans to improve performance in primary schools include promoting reading activities through the use of fiction and non-fiction stories.
"We want to create lifelong and responsible readers and learners," the minister said.
Teachers will be required to undergo training workshops to brief them on the latest teaching and learning methods.
Bahrain, with a total population of slightly over a million, including 500,000 expatriates, has 230 primary schools.
English, the second language after Arabic, is taught from the third year in public schools, but is the medium of instruction in most private schools.
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