8:25 a.m., June 25, 2009----Baerbel Schumacher, program coordinator, and Deborah Detzel, assistant director of the University of Delaware's English Language Institute recently returned from teacher training conferences held near Cairo, Egypt; Amman, Jordan, and Rabat, Morocco. The three in-country conferences successfully concluded a five-year comprehensive teacher training initiative referred to as Partnership for Teaching (P4T).

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The project, funded since 2004 though the U.S. Department of State's Fulbright Office teacher training branch, has brought a total of 162 teachers from Syria, Jordan, Morocco and Egypt to Delaware to study communicative and student-centered methods of teaching English, develop workshop presentation skills, and learn about U.S. culture in order to enable them to serve as trainers for colleagues in their own countries.

As a result, more than 500 additional teachers have received training in communicative methods of teaching in all four countries.

Moroccan program alumnus Hicham Sadiki summed up the program's impact, saying, “The P4T Teacher Training Program has helped us to ameliorate our classroom performance, to deepen our knowledge and to enrich our experience. Thanks to the six weeks we spent in the USA, our English has improved. Now we can speak this language with more confidence. We can talk to our students about America and Americans, not only according to what we read in books but also what we saw with our own eyes. We can give interesting workshops, and we can organize successful conferences.”