Mongolian schools embrace English as main foreign language

According to Education Minister of Mongolia P. Naranbayar, students in the country’s schools will learn English as the main foreign language starting from the beginning of the upcoming school season.

During a meeting devoted to curriculums for pre-school and primary education, he announced that Mongolian students will start learning English from Sept. 1 of the year.

«English has already been assigned as the main foreign language in our schools. The best way to learn a foreign language is to be in an environment where you don’t feel that you’re learning it, while repetition is the most vital thing. We have to develop textbooks that would deliver this task,» the minister said.

More than one hundred schools will offer English lessons under the Pearson English program in a test mode. Then, the country will send its English teachers abroad and to linguistic centers in Mongolia to help them improve their skills and obtain master’s degrees.

According to Gazeta-N1, a media outlet from Buryatia (Russia), Mongolian schools will teach English to students from the third grade and above.

The context: In May 2023, the Great State Khural, Mongolia’s parliament, adopted amendments to the educational law, making English the main foreign language in schools. Even though local authorities initially wanted to start teaching the language from the first grade, they eventually decided to begin with the third grade.

Before these amendments, English was taught to intermediate school students along with the Russian language, which had been the main foreign language in Mongolia for years. Moreover, for the vast majority of Mongolian schools, Russian was the only foreign language available for learning, according to local media outlets.

As Babr.24.com reported, the issue of amendments swiftly became a politically sensitive topic, creating a rift within Mongolian society. The draft law was aimed to eliminate the difference between private and public schools, as many private education facilities offered their students the choice to learn English, Russian, Chinese and Japanese as second languages.

Some MPs opposed the novelty, claiming that English could become a second official language in the country. Others argued that by acquiring English, the youth would be more inclined to leave the country. On the contrary, supporters of the law insisted that the government should simply create better conditions for young people within the country to make them want to stay, rather than leave for more economically successful states.

In 2022, Kazakhstani authorities decided to teach the Russian and English languages starting from the second grade, instead of the first as before. This change was applied to schools where Kazakh was the language of instruction. At the time, Minister of Education of Kazakhstan Askhat Aimagambetov claimed that first-grade students struggled with learning three languages at once.