The Government looks forward to putting Chinese language teachers on payroll, a move aimed at supporting them and providing an incentive to start teaching the language in lower secondary schools, the director National Curriculum Development Center (NCDC), Ms Grace Baguma has unveiled.
“The curriculum taps into emerging issues today and why we need Chinese. We had to write a lot of defense documents on why we need Chinese language; we wrote and everybody understood and we had to start it. I know we have it in a few schools but now I like the effort of putting the Chinese teachers on the payroll as we roll out the language,because it’s a language and we need teachers to teach it,” she said.
The announcement was made during the launch of a nine-month diploma in-service teacher training of the fourth cohort of40 teachers in Chinese language at Luyanzi Institute of Technology in Kampala on Tuesday.
However, Ms Baguma did not reveal the time when this plan would come to fruition.
“Normally when you introduce a new subject on the curriculum, you train teachers on how to teach that subject. The training will prepare them to teach the Chinese language in the lower secondary curriculum which now has five foreign languages, including Chinese,” she added.
According to the director, NCDC plans to adopt a Chinese expert at the ministry in order to make the teaching of Chinese language sustainable across the country.
“China is one of the emerging economies and we are doing a lot as a country with china. You need to be multilingual, it helps in development which the world is requiring today. When you have more than one language you’re at an advantage of belonging to the globe,” she said.
Mr Ismael Mulindwa, the director basic and secondary education at NCDC, remarked that the Chinese language has become an important factor that can’t be ignored in the developing industrial world.
According to him, there is no other option than training those who are going to implement the program that Uganda has embraced.
Mr Mulindwa said the ministry has expressed its self in recruiting teachers of Chinese, which will help popularize the teaching in lower schools and give an opportunity to the Chinese teachers to get on the government pay roll.
“We are looking at continuing it with A-level. We have developed a draft but are yet to present it to the council for approval. We are doing groundwork on revising the whole A- level curriculum, we have done an assessment and we think we shall present it as one of the languages taught so that we can tap into the diploma and degree’s at tertiary level,” he said.
The director general Luyanzi institute of technology, Ms Wang Li Hong said the Chinese teaching program will promote the sharing of cultures between Uganda and China.
“Since signing a memorandum of incorporation with Confucius Institute at Makerere University in 2015, we created a great link with our institute that is helping us teach the Chinese language to Ugandans,” she said.
The deputy director Luyanzi institute Mr Ayub Sooma said the program which has so far passed out 98 Chinese language teachers that are distributed in 60 schools across the country will help the ministry of education and sports to teach the Chinese language across the country in secondary schools that will strengthen the bilateral ties between the two countries.
However, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Education, Dr Denis Mugimba said he was not aware of these arrangements.