English to be taught starting from 1st grade in Kazakhstan

Children will be learning English starting from the first grade in all Kazakhstan schools. The novelty will be introduced country-wide starting from the new academic year (September 1, 2013), Tengrinews.kz reports referring to Minister of Education and Science of Kazakhstan Bakytzhan Zhumagulov. “367 000 children will go to the first grade this September in Kazakhstan. All of them will start learning English. The English Language will become part of the curriculum starting from the first grade. It is the polylingualism our President was talking about,” the Minister of Education and Science said at the meeting with heads of foreign music universities in Astana. Some of the schools are even planning to teach several subjects in English besides the English Language subject. These could be the subjects like English Literature and English History. At present the Ministry is focusing in training enough teachers to do the classes. Earlier Tengrinews.kz reported that 165 Kazakhstan schools were running a pilot project: they started teaching English from the second grade. There are 7755 general education schools in Kazakhstan according to the 2010 report of the Statistics Agency of Kazakhstan. By Gulnara Zhandagulova