Over three thousand primary English teachers from the East Malaysian states of Sarawak, Sabah and Labuan have benefitted from a radically new teacher-led mentoring project. The English Language Teacher Development Project (ELTDP) is supporting the Malaysian Ministry of Education to make a step-change in the quality of English teaching.

The project began in 2011 and ended in 2015

The project aims to improve teaching and learning of English while raising teachers’ English proficiency, increase the use of teaching aids and encourage the involvement of parents and the local community. However, traditional training approaches, providing one-off professional development sessions have had limited success in Malaysia, so the project focuses on developing teachers’ own reflective practice allowing teachers to identify areas to explore within the mentoring relationship. 

To enable this to work in the 600 schools in East Malaysia, many of which are in very remote locations, one hundred and twenty mentors were placed across the region, each working with a cluster of schools in their area.  

Within the ELTDP project there were a number of interventions aimed at promoting early year’s literacy and sustainable development of the teachers in East Malaysia.

These include the following;