As many as 200 students selected from three educational districts will compete for the top honours in the English Olympiad 2011 to be hosted by the District Centre for English (DCE), Neyyattinkara, in association with The Hindu , a t the Kanakakunnu Palace here on Tuesday.
DCE tutors C. Manoj and A. Jabeena and general convenor of the programme T. Rajeesh told a press meeting here on Saturday that the event was designed to motivate children to use English for daily classroom activities and fuel in them a love for the language. The competition items include skit, choreography, comic presentation, group discussion, and film review. A ‘best speaker' award has been instituted for teachers. Students participating in the event on Tuesday were selected from the preliminary rounds held at the educational district-level competition. Mayor K. Chandrika is scheduled to inaugurate the programme. An exhibition of English classroom products is also being organised. Minister for Education P.K. Abdu Rabb will inaugurate the valedictory session at 4.30 p.m. the same day. The District Centre for English was established in 1999 by the Department of General Education, with the support of the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Initially, the centre imparted training to secondary-school teachers in English. By 2008, the training programme was extended to primary-school teachers. From 2010, the jurisdiction of DCE, Thiruvananthapuram, was extended to Alappuzha and Kottayam districts. The centre conducts a 10-day English teacher orientation programme, a correspondence-cum-contact programme, and a certificate course in teaching English and school-level programmes. The centre won the national award from NCERT, Delhi, for the best teacher training institute in India for innovative practices.