Boom in English teaching in north

The 15 students attending Yassin Said's English interpreting course make up an impressive cross section of the northern Iraqi governorate of Sulaymaniyah's educated classes. There are teachers, a journalist, an electrician, a geologist and a social researcher. There's even the president of the city's karate federation. "It's not just aid we need in this region," physiotherapist Shnuria Ibrahim, who'll be attending classes five days a week for the next six months, told IRIN. "Above all we need knowledge, and the best way to get that is to have better English skills." Learning English is all the rage in northern Iraq. In Sulaymaniyah alone, a city of around 700,000, five adhoc language schools now work alongside the university languages department, the teacher training institute and the so-called "koleji ewari", paying afternoon courses at university. Widely considered the best in the city, Said's school teaches 250 children in the morning and 300 adults after lunch. "The wonderful thing about classrooms is that they're not just to teach in, they're also a powerful tool for changing mentalities," enthused Said, who set up Sulaymaniyah's first language school in 1999. ACE, his second school, opened in July 2003. A visit to an afternoon beginner's class makes it very clear what he means. Middle-aged men sit next to teenage girls, some veiled, some not. They're pretending to be at an English cocktail party, asking each other simple questions. A few of the younger students still have the habit, learned at state school, of standing up when asked to speak. Said politely tells them to sit down again. Students in the class said they were also frustrated with the job situation in the country as unemployment is high. "Iraq is a country built on useless pieces of paper," complained freelance English teacher Tawfiq Ali. His interview in English for a job as interpreter at Sulaymaniyah's Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs went very well, until he was asked what qualifications he had. When he said he was a graduate of the teaching college, he was shown the door. "Only university degrees were enough, apparently," he said. The fact that Yassin Said is unable to hand out certificates sank his first attempt at an interpreting course last year. Three months in, he had to give students their money back. "We desperately need international help: native speakers, but above all the intervention of bodies capable of certifying us," he said. "The idea for my first school came from visits to the British Council in Baghdad. Where are they now?" It would be wrong to say there has been no international involvement in Iraq's language teaching. Before it closed shop at the end of June, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) did organise exams in the standard US English proficiency test, TOEFL. Volunteer teachers from Britain and Canada have just finished an academic year in Sulaymaniyah. Gerard Gautier, who founded a language institute in Arbil five years ago, nonetheless shares Said's frustration. "All my attempts to get permission to start up DELTA courses [English teaching certificate for non-native speakers] have failed," he said. "Presumably people in the West assume Kurdish-controlled areas are as dangerous as Fallujah. I can assure them they are not." A French-speaking philosophy professor at Arbil's Salahaddin University, Ferhad Pirbal, thinks the international community's -and particularly Europe's - slowness to help has more to do with politics. In 2002, he visited Paris to speak to Boutros Boutros Ghali, former United Nations Secretary-General and president of the Francophone Union. "All I asked for was token cultural support for Kurds," he fumed. "But he told me I would need an authorisation letter from Saddam Hussein." Faced with the near total silence of the international community, Iraq's Kurds have done what they always do when other avenues are closed: they have bent the rules to make ends meet. Mawludi Street is well known to Sulaymaniyah's students and teachers of English. It is here, at the heart of the city's bazaar, that they find English books at knockdown prices. In Hasan Tawiq's neat shop, you can buy Headway and Murphy's Essential Grammar - the bane of English language teachers the world over - at roughly a fifth of normal prices. "We buy them from counterfeiters in Tehran, and smuggle them across the border to avoid paying taxes," said Tawfiq. Far from legal, he admits, but in his opinion the main reason behind the last five years' boom in language learning. "Before the Iranians started copying these textbooks in the late 1990s, they were far too expensive for most people to buy," he explained. "Now, foreign language books make up 10 percent of my shelf space and 20 percent of my profits." "It goes against the grain of humanitarian aid, I know," said Yassin Said. "But I believe the only way to tap this new enthusiasm is by giving help to private organisations. The local authorities in Iraq are petrified of change." He's not the only one to use the argument. Others point out that government-controlled educational institutions in Kurdish areas have become the stamping ground of political parties, anxious to ensure their members get the right qualifications. With luck, Yassin and others like him will not have to wait too long for help. International NGOs are beginning to show interest in his plan to set up a monolingual English school for children. "My aim is to open the school to all comers," he said. "But I need financial help to be able to do that," he added. An unabashed idealist, Yassin intends to break entirely with the state curriculum. "I'm planning to make the teaching of human rights and civil society a major part of my curriculum", he said. "For too long, the Kurdish ideal was the peshmerga [freedom fighters]. Our children need to be taught how to fight without guns." "They also need to learn that we live not just on this patch of earth called Kurdistan, or in this country called Iraq, but on a planet called Earth."