Uzbekistan: English Speaking Nation Program

PAS Tashkent announces an open competition for a grant for the FY2019 English Speaking Nation program for Uzbekistan. The English Speaking Nation program is part of a larger collaboration between the United States Government and the Government of Uzbekistan (GOU), specifically U.S. assistance and support to Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Public Education (MPE). The GOU is eager to strengthen English language education and to incorporate English more broadly into public education curricula. There are 9,691 schools in the Republic of Uzbekistan, which educate about 6,000,000 children. Each year, more than 600,000 children graduate from public schools in Uzbekistan. The goal of this program is to improve graduates’ proficiency in the English language by addressing deficiencies in the linguistic and pedagogical skills of the 32,000 English language teachers working in public schools. MPE is particularly interested in improving graduates’ employability, opportunities to matriculate at universities abroad, and access to information, data, and resources available only in English. To achieve this goal, the public school system of Uzbekistan needs qualified English language teachers. MPE and PAS assess the current level of English proficiency of the majority of English language teachers as quite low. In order to address this deficiency,this project would meet the following goals and objectives: Goal: Support Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Public Education efforts to strengthen English language education and to incorporate English more broadly into public education curricula. Objective 1: Provide a baseline assessment of public schoolteachers’ English language capabilities. Objective 2: Provide a baseline assessment of public schoolteachers’ teaching skills and effectiveness of their teaching methods. Objective 3: Develop plans for teachers based on these findings. Objective 4: Provide training and continuing education for teachers to improve their English language and pedagogical skills. Objective 5: Provide a final assessment of the extent to which teachers increased their language skills and implemented concepts learned in their trainings.