The British Council hosted the Reader Development Conference 2018 on 9 February 2018 at the Dhaka University campus office. Book Reading programme is a flagship outreach programme of the British Council Library. We are organising this programme since 2010 to develop reading habits and language proficiency in English through reading simplified version of storybooks. Reader Development Conference is an annual award-giving ceremony and experience-sharing event among the coordinators of the Book Reading programme.
62 participants from 23 partner institutions comprising of English and Bangla medium schools, colleges and universities attended the conference. Coordinators from 13 institutions presented their work and discussed about their own journeys with the Book Reading Competition, and shared ideas of innovative ways to run such projects.
Sarwat Masuda Reza, Head of Cultural Centre, British Council pointed out the importance of developing reading habits and how competitions like such can help to do so. Tania Mansur, English Language Teacher, Teaching Centre, British Council conducted an interactive Brainstorming session on ‘Motivating to read’ followed by a training session on ‘Making lessons more student centred’. The participants enjoyed the session thoroughly. Tanzina Akter, National Child Protection Manager, British Council also took a session on Child Protection awareness. In this informative session, she gave clear guidelines on interacting with children and discussed some action points too. Later, a briefing session on Studying and Living in the UK, covered ways students can progress their education further in the UK and the support they can get from the British Council. Finally, all the partner institutions were awarded a crest for their cooperation and support. The coordinators are looking forward to having informative sessions like this more often.