British Council offers a new technique of studying English

While endless debates on the dominance of Russian or Ukrainian are underway in Ukraine, Europe is going through a language revolution. Europeans are changing their attitude to foreign languages.

Now they assess one’s command of a language not in terms of vocabulary and grammar, but by how one can use a foreign language in a concrete situation. The British Council, a 75-year-old international organization that represents Great Britain in the scientific and educational domains, invites Ukrainians to study English using European standards.

On the British Council’s initiative, the National University of State Customs Service in Irpin (a scenic Kyiv suburb) will host a national fair of English study programs and resources on October 28-30, involving more than 100 English teachers from all over Ukraine.

The organizers are convinced that such projects are topical and useful. In order to become part of the Bologna Process (officially launched in Ukraine in 2005), a quality breakthrough must be made in the instruction of English in the first place. Instead, there isn’t a single study center geared to adjust and implement the European study system if not to work out a national foreign language assessment scale, says Olena Horsheniova, BC educational project manager. Also, the organizers intend to provide free English language online resources for students and teachers during the fair, developed by the British Council and the BBC with the British government’s support.