Shankar Adhikari
National Centre for Educational Development (NCED)
When I was a university student, I visited the British Council and its library for the first time. I was studying English language and the library held a wide variety of resources for English language teaching. It turned out to be a very fruitful experience for me. Initially, I thought that the British Council was just an organization for the management of IELTS exam, but I found that it had lots of other activities as well.
Later on, I attended the English for Teaching, Teaching for English (ETTE) training course. ETTE was a project initiated and run by the British Council. This was my first time attending an ELT training delivered by a native speaker. After that I attended a British Council sponsored training in Sri Lanka called Professional Award for ELT Training. It was a 12-day training course and carried six credits.
The British Council signed an MOU with NCED (National Center for Education Development), organization for teacher training in Nepal. The name of the project was NIITE (National Initiative to Improve Teaching in English). It was a project for English teaching in schools, designed to help teachers improve and enhance their language skills to facilitate learning in the classroom. British Council provided us with immense support at that time. They helped us in manual development, particularly for NIITE. The British Council, not only helped develop a manual for the teachers, but provided technical assistance for the development of manuals. NCED then produced these manuals and distributed them to teachers across the country. Trainers were trained, who then proceeded to the different districts to cascade the same trianing. In Project NIITE, there were two types of trainers, the government trainers, and the British Council trainers. During the implementation of NIITE both sets of trainers worked together to deliver the training. This proved to be highly beneficial for both parties. Not only did we exchanged ideas but collaborated to work in an interesting environment.