Thousands of students in UP tune in to AIR to learn English

BIJNOR: Thousands of children studying in selected upper primary schools across Uttar Pradesh huddled together around radio sets on Monday morning to listen to All India Radio’s show ‘Aao Angrezi Sikhen’ (let us learn English), an initiative of the state’s education department and the public broadcaster to arrest the sinking standard of education in government schools.
The move aims to improve English of government school students, who lag behind their peers studying in public schools. Children of government schools in the northern hinterland also face difficulty in finding employment due to lack of knowledge of the language. Neighbouring Uttarakhand has already decided to shift the medium of instruction from Hindi to English in its schools.
Catching up with the changing trend, the Lucknow centre of AIR started the broadcast of the 15-minute programme from Monday. It will be aired on alternate days — Monday, Wednesday and Friday — between 10.45am to 11am for students of class 6 to 8.
This initiative will be monitored by school authorities, which will send a report on it to the state government.
On first day of the radio show, students were taught three sentences-- what is your name, how old are you and where do you live?
Sunil Kumar, a student of class 8, said after the show: “It is a good move. Now, we will also learn English. I am very happy. I have noted down the three sentences taught on the show on my register. We students have decided to revise all the English sentences every day and discuss them among ourselves.”
In Bijnor alone, there are a total of 2,556 government schools. Of these, 765 are upper primary schools, in which around 50,000 students of class 6 to 8 study.
Basic shiksha adhikari (BSA) Mahesh Chandra said: “It is a good initiative taken by the government. We hope that the programme will help students in learning the English language.”
District secretary of junior high school teachers' association, Dushyant Kumar, said. “We welcome the move from our heart.”