Egypt’s Minister of Education and Technical Education, Reda Hegazy, signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on Thursday in Cairo with Italian Ambassador Michele Quaroni to incorporate the teaching of Italian in all Egyptian public schools beginning in the academic year 2024/2025.The Egyptian Ministry of Education has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Italian Ambassador to introduce Italian as a second foreign language in public schools. The curriculum will be tailor-made for the Egyptian education system by the University of Siena in Italy. The MoU outlines that Italian will be optional in the first grade of preparatory school, but students will be obliged to learn the language until their general or technical secondary education is completed. The duration of studying Italian in public schools will be six years, and language proficiency by the end of secondary school should correspond to level A2 of the European language proficiency standards. The Italian Cultural Center will train Italian language teachers through distance learning. In addition to Italian, Russian will also be introduced in Egypt’s schools as a second foreign language. The decision to include Russian came a few days after a similar decision to make French a “compulsory” second language in Egyptian public schools for students in the first year of middle school and above by the 2024/2025 academic year. The Egyptian Ministry of Education has yet to announce when Russian will be offered to students. Furthermore, Deputy Minister of Education and Technical Education Mohamed Megahed announced that 12 preparatory schools in three governorates will offer Chinese as an optional second language in the upcoming 2023/2024 academic year
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