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The “Go Teacher” programme under which Ecuadorian teachers study English overseas, will begin operations in St. Vincent and the Grenadines this September, Minister of Foreign Affairs Camillo Gonsalves has said.

The programme, which is also executed at universities in the Unites States, was initially scheduled to begin in SVG last January, but was postponed.

Gonsalves said that the “Go Teacher” programme is collaboration among the SVG Community College, the University of the West Indies in Barbados and the Dominica State College.

He said SVG has been designated as the primary spot where Ecuadorians will be learning English.

“But we do not currently have all the capacity we will need in terms of teachers and classrooms space to manage all that they want to send initially.”

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He said about 50 Ecuadorians teachers will come SVG this year and will take class at SVGCC and the government hopes to grow the programme from there.

SVG has received “feelers” from other Latin American allies who want to send their students to SVG to learn English, Gonsalves said.

“We are trying to get our own teachers formally trained in the teaching of English as a second language, we are hoping to expand some of our classroom space and facilities, and we know that the private sector has already done a lot of work in getting apartments and residences ready for what we hope to be a fairly strong influx of our Spanish brothers and sisters who want to come and learn English,” Gonsalves said.

“And the opportunity to reciprocate is also there. We hope to be able to send Vincentians to those countries to learn Spanish.

“This is a venture that is going to generate revenue. These students are paying tuition to the Community College. It is not an act of grant assistance between our countries. They will be paying for their education, they will be paying for their room and board. Of course, they will be buying food from supermarkets and all the rest of it,” he said.

“And when people talk about stay over tourism, that it is better for your tourists to come and spend a night or two than to come on a cruise ship and leave — a stay over tourist is more valuable, well even more valuable than that is a stay over student,” he said.

Each batch of students studying under the “Go Teacher” programme will remain in SVG for seven months, Gonsalves said.

He also told the media that as part of “Cooperation for the learning and perfection of the English language for diplomats”, Quito will send some of their foreign service officers to be stationed at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in SVG where they will learn English from their Vincentian counterparts.

The first three will arrive in July and will stay for three months, Gonsalves said.

4 replies on “Ecuadorian teachers to begin learning English in St. Vincent this year”

  1. C. ben-David says:

    Camilo says, “… we do not currently have all the capacity we will need in terms of teachers and classrooms space to manage all [the 50 teachers] that they want to send initially.”

    We never seem to have the capacity for anything the government want to do.

    More important, second-language learning is increasingly a private-sector activity all over the world. Why is the government involved in this at all?

    As others have said about this programme, many of our teachers are barely literate themselves in standard English, and spend much of their time teaching our children in Creole. Dominica is just as bad.

    Judging from many of the ungrammatical, poorly spelled, and illogical comments on this site from supposedly educated people, SVG is the last place anyone should come to learn English.

  2. You are quite right David, how can a bunch of Vincentian people teach Spanish speakers English when our teachers are hardly understood in SVG, least of all somewhere they speak real English.

    What a joke, even the comrade has a bad accent, a good vocabulary but bad pronunciation.

    I don’t think it will ever happen, I suspect it is another lie.

    1. C. ben-David says:

      Peter, I suspect there is much more to this than teaching English. It just doesn’t pass the smell test.

      On mainland China, learning English is exploding with both the government and the citizenry keen to learn this language of international commerce, trade, literature, science, etc.

      But they don’t usually send people overseas for language training; they bring people from overseas, especially lots of older people who would love to live in China for a few years, even at a very low salary, to teach. It is the cheapest way to teach a second language.

      Many, if not most, of them are employed by private companies.

      There is something fishy about the programme here and the fact that the government is running it when there are so many retired teachers, many of them quite literate (unlike their younger peers) who could do the same work cheaper and better if employed by a private company.

      1. Why exactly do they want to come here when they can be taught in their own country at a fraction of the cost?

        Also there are many thousands of retired UK teachers who are English language specialists. The just love working for the volunteer societies and many travel the educational world already.

        So what is that about, my problem is that because the PM tells lie’s I for one cannot believe the story until these people actually turn up at the new Argyle airport when it’s finished in July of this year.

        Wait, stop press, it is now announced a new date for opening in December, that makes it the 16th new opening date.

        What we can be absolutely positive of; they will announce two more new dates for next year.

        Perhaps two more dates each year for several years after that.

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