Bengaluru: The state government’s push for English to be taught in state-run schools is proving to be a struggle. While the authorities are looking for ways to strengthen English learning in government schools in a bid to improve enrollment, the ongoing one-month English training for teachers is fraught with academic and administrative issues, an internal survey has found.

Owing to the lack of qualified English teachers, the Education Department has started training existing teachers in the language. The Regional Institute of English – South India (RIESI) has trained 204 teachers as master resource persons in English.

In turn, they train teachers for a month in districts. This replaced the traditional five-day training that was held for teachers. The target is to train 10,000 primary school teachers in English, of which officials claim to have trained 4,600 since last year.

In a refresher course held recently, all master resource persons were asked to provide feedback on how teachers were responding to English training. Many teachers, they said, are facing difficulty with grammar and phonetics.

The biggest problem is that there are no English teachers. We are training teachers to teach English along with other subjects that they handle in schools,” RIESI director S Jayakumar said.