Lahore: First time in its history, the Government College University Lahore has offered admissions to students in eleven foreign and national language courses which include Arabic, French, and Russian.
The diverse range of courses is certainly applaud worthy. From more familiar, close to region and origin Punjabi, Persian, Urdu and Hindi, to Chinese, Turkish, German and the globally recognized English, GCU is providing its students an incredible language mix to choose from when it comes to learning a language.
A public notification in this regard has been issued on the direction of Vice Chancellor Prof. Dr. Asghar Zaidi who believes in promoting effective engagement of youth in academic as well as co-curricular activities.
Prof. Zaidi said that in European countries students took a gap year and spent a whole year engaging in a mixture of language lessons and cultural courses so as to improve their life skills.
Unfortunately in Pakistan, the Vice Chancellor said, students who got the gap year due to supplementary examinations or other reasons wasted their precious time on social media or in other non-productive activities due to a lack of opportunities.
“So, we have decided to open admissions in the Language Communication Skills Courses which were specially designed to focus on refining the students’ communicative ability with emphasis on listening, speaking, reading and writing skills,” Prof. Zaidi said.
He added that these courses would be taught through lectures, group discussions, extensive writing activities, simulations, audio-visual aids and student presentations.
Prof. Zaidi said that classes were scheduled in the evening, so that regular university students and professionals from different fields could also join.
The Vice Chancellor said that the fee for these three-month language courses was kept highly nominal i.e. between Rs. 5,000 to Rs. 15,000 per language course, so that maximum number of students could benefit from it.
According to the notification, the GCU Lahore has opened admission to the Arabic, English, French, German, Hindi, Persian, Punjabi, Turkish, Russian and the Urdu languages.
The last date to apply is January 20, 2020 while the classes would commence from next month.
The schedule for the Chinese language course would be announced separately.
