English in Action - Knowing where your journey begins

Adrian Kirkwood on the English in Action project working in Bangladesh for 9 years to improve communicative English. It hopes to impact on 25million people to help them use English as an everyday tool. IET has the role of research, monitoring and Evaluation. A very early finding is that oral/aural testing is not in place so the project has had to carry out 5,000 interviews to see what level of competence and interest there is in speaking English. Working at a distance means that consultants carry out the data collection - surveys, interviews and observations. In parallel a study of resources and environment looked at teaching resources and issues such as lack of electricity and computers. This has not been easy - paperwork and weather being too extra barriers. The focus is on what makes a difference. Within particular areas (primary, secondary, adult) the evaluation will come mainly from those invoved in developing the support. Project wide and comparison with other projects is IET's responsibility. One comment was how impressed DfiD has been with the work so far and how it could be a model for other initiatives.