The Department of School Education has launched an initiative called ‘Mentor a Student’ to help students score well in the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) examination.
Principal Secretary, School Education, Praveen Prakash has urged teachers, parents and officials of the department to take up the responsibility to make the State-level initiative a success. Students of Classes VI to IX would be mentored by their teachers who would help them hone their listening and speaking skills in the English language.
Setting an example, Mr. Praveen Prakash announced that he would shoulder the responsibility of mentoring Santosh, a Class VI student, and urged others to follow suit. “It is important to mentor students in this area to infuse confidence in them,” he said.
The department has been instructed to include a separate period for TOEFL in the daily curriculum. Similarly, a separate exam (English Paper-II) will be conducted in the formative and summative tests, but the classes will be confined to listening and speaking skills as the components of vocabulary, grammar and comprehension are already part of the regular English course.
As part of a five-year-long partnership with the US-based Educational Testing Service (ETS) to impart training in English-speaking skills to students of the State-run-schools, the latter will evaluate and certify the English language proficiency of students through its TOEFL Young Students Series assessments.
