Deputy Minister for Education, Rev. John Ntim Fordjour, has commended the visionaries of Ecole Thérèse Internationale for their efforts aimed at promoting French education in Ghana.
With Ghana situated among many francophone countries and the creation of the African Continental Free Trade Area, it has become necessary for more people to take a keen interest in learning the French language.
Speaking at the inauguration of the Ecole Thérèse Internationale, the Deputy Minister said that high literacy in the French language among professionals in the country will break the language barrier stifling international trade.
“If we’re introducing at the various streams even up to the tertiary level the promotion of education of French, we will have engineers, scientists, lawyers, doctors and many other professionals who will be able to also lend their skills to neighbouring countries that speak French and language will not be a barrier for which their skills should be limited to a particular location.”
“And this is why I commend highly the initiative of the chairpersons, proprietors and directors of Ecole Thérèse for this great initiative in investing heavily in the promotion of education of French,” he stated.
The Principal of Ecole Thérèse Internationale, Mrs. Theodora Wood, detailed how the teaching staff is disarming the general phobia associated with learning French.
“I’m leveraging the experiences that I had myself. I went through the mill, learning French. I know what the difficulties and challenges are, so what I am doing with the team is actually bringing out these challenges and developing solutions that address them directly. For example, I do know that people get discouraged because their French teachers probably did not give them that extra excitement that should be related to the learning to make it effective. So what we’ve done is that the modules are very interactive, they’re fun. We use games, real-life situations and role-plays so our learners come to class and don’t even realize they’re learning,” she explained.
She further touched on what the institution is doing to make French education accessible to less privileged persons.
“We created a foundation called the Sunrise foundation with the idea of leveraging our own platform to also deliver French lessons to children who cannot afford but are brilliant and have the potential to enable them to also dream big and work very hard to achieve those dreams. We are knocking on the doors of corporate bodies who have corporate social responsibilities that also align with these values to come on board to enable us to deliver to such children,” she said.
About the School
Ecole Thérèse Internationale, is a bilingual learning institution. It’s a mini-academy that uses an innovative, results-based, multi-pronged approach to reach its target audiences with carefully designed French and English tuition.
The curriculum is a careful blend of international bilingual curricula, informed by the International Baccalaureate curriculum, Cambridge curriculum and “ENF” – Education Nationale Française.
The school also delivers virtually using its own dedicated LMS – Learning Management System.