Group of experts formed to improve language skills of English

Expressing concern over poor language skills of English teachers of government schools, Punjab Education Minister Daljit Singh Cheema today constituted a core group of experts to work out a long-term strategy to improve their English.
Disclosing this here today, an official spokesman said the core group consisting of heads of 17 District Institute of Education Training (DIET), heads of 12 Government In Service Teachers Training Institutes (GIST) have been called for a meeting tomorrow in Mohali to chalk out both long-term and short-term strategy to improve the language skills of English teachers.
The core group has been mandated with the task of studying the problem in depth, work out a crash course for the teachers, curriculum of the crash course besides working out details of long term training programme for English teachers.

Cheema has issued instructions that he would personally monitor the training programme and would ensure that teachers raise their teaching standards to tackle this problem permanently.
Notably, about 80,000 class 10 students of government schools failed in English exam this year.
Yesterday, the minister even presided over a meeting of English teachers whose students failed in English exam.

The minister found glaring grammatical mistakes in suggestions written by English teachers for improving performance.
The Minister expressed concern over the deteriorating academic standards in the schools and said the teachers were more responsible for the decline than the students.
It was a matter of grave concern that the replies given by the teachers were full of grammatical errors and lower standards of English which signify that even teachers were not capable of giving good lessons of English to the students, he said.