BPO firm to give English refresher courses to teachers

AN INFORMATION technology and business process outsourcing (BPO) company is investing on a project focusing on training school teachers on the English language to help students improve their English proficiency.

Romit Gupta, country general manager of Wipro BPO Philippines Ltd., said the firm had partnered with the Department of Education in Central Visayas to implement the project, which they called the “Communication Excellence for Public Education (CEPE).”

Gupta and DepEd-7 Director Recaredo Borgonia signed the agreement yesterday.

“We believe that with good teachers we can produce good students who will be readily absorbed by the industries that will need them like the BPO industry,” Gupta said.

He said the project would help public school teachers brush up on the English language especially on the critical areas often mistaken by Filipinos, like subject-verb agreements, redundancy and “Filipinoisms” such as the phrase “in fairness.”

“We have already conducted trainings to two batches with a total of 60 students in May and we have seen early improvements, which only show the potential for the project to take on a better shape than what it has now,” Rupta said.

Borgonia said DepEd-7 welcomed the initiative from the private sectors such as Wipro’s CEPE as it jives with the department’s thrust in improving the English proficiency and addressing the gap between the academe and the industries like the BPOs.

“We hope to address that (low English proficiency of students) with this simple initiative that will surely have a ripple effect to our students as each teacher would handle at least 30 students per class,” he said.

Borgonia said for the early stages of the project, they will focus more on the high school teachers and later on with the elementary teachers in Cebu. /Reporter Aileen Garcia-Yap