With an aim to equip students with fluency in foreign tongues and help them in exploring international careers, city-based schools are promoting foreign languages education among the students.
Several schools which were offering foreign language course in French for students of 4th to 8th, have also started classes in German too.
French and German are some of the most sought after foreign languages in the Steel City after English. A multilingual person can act as a bridge between two distinct cultures and actually represent various activities be it social or professional.
Loyola School joined hands with PASCH (Schools: Partners for the Future) initiative, a global network of some 1,500 schools that place a high value on German, to promote the language. Loyola became a partner school with PASCH.
“We provide German language from class 4 to our students. There are many reasons why we should learn a foreign language. Learning a language of another country helps one understand its culture. Language becomes a peephole to look at the nation’s culture, its traditions and its history. Loads of research work, journals and documents need immediate translation into English to facilitate knowledge liquidity in the Indian market. Building a workforce that is fluent in a foreign language is vital to assisting India’s emerging status on several international fronts,” said Father Pius Fernandes, principal, Loyola School.
Carmel Junior College is too offering German for school students while Hill Top School offers French lessons for students. An official of the Carmel school said that the initiative is to provide a learning opportunity to the students to expand their horizon. They will learn the German language and its culture.
The city schools also celebrate German Language Day. The celebration was started in 2001 on September 5. Since then people all over the world who people speak or learn German celebrate this day in the month of September . There are around 20 million students all over the world learn German whose mother tongue is not German.
With an aim to equip students with fluency in foreign tongues and help them in exploring international careers, a few city-based schools are now also planning to introduce Chinese Mandarin language.
Chinese is an important global language today considering boom in economy being witnessed in China. Depending on the response to French classes, we plan to launch Chinese soon,” noted, principal on condition of anonymity.