GOVT URGED TO ESTABLISH FRENCH UNIVERSITY

French teachers in the Northern Region of Ghana are advocating for the establishment of a university purposely for the mass training of teachers to meet the current high demand for French professionals in the country’s educational sector.

They are also asking the government to make the learning of French a compulsory subject right from the basic school to the tertiary levels.

The French teachers’ made these request at this year’s French Awareness Day Celebration in the Northern Regional capital, Tamale. The event was under the theme: “Connect with the world; learn French”.

According to the Northern Regional Director for Centre for the Teaching of French (CREFT), Cletus Ganaah, the establishment of a higher institution of learning for French only would help solve the problem associated with the shortage of French teachers in the system.

He further stated that even though currently, there are quite a number of French professionals ready to take up teaching as a profession, they have not been accepted by the Ghana Education Service simply because, they were trained outside the country.

Mr. Ganaah added that, there are a lot of bureaucracies involving the process that people trained outside have to go through in order to acquire accreditation or recognition before they can teach in public or government schools.

The Director of CREFT also noted that, the Francophone countries in Africa have made the learning of English compulsory in their schools, which is therefore complementing their efforts on the job market and trade across the continent and other parts of the world. This is because French is the second widely spoken language in the world after English, he observed.

The Northern Regional Director of the GES, Mrs. Elisabeth De-souza, appealed to parents to encourage their children to take the study of French very serious like any other subject taught in the school.

She also urged the few French teachers in the schools to be committed to their work and make their learning of the subject very simple and interesting for students to learn it.

Meanwhile, about thirty (30) Primary, Junior High and Senior High School students were awarded for their outstanding performances in a French quiz competition held last September.

They were given dictionaries and other French literature books whilst first places would meet in Accra few months time for national contest (grand finale).