In August, 2013, English language and Development Center opened at University of Raparin. “The main reason as to opening the center was that Raparin University students had no opportunity to apply to a master’s degree at the other Kurdistan Regional’s public universities due to not having meeting English requirements required for regional public universities.

In addition, few graduates could apply to take an English language course at the other public universities in Erbil, Sulemanyeah and Koya, since they had no or little opportunity to participate in their language courses. Accordingly we realized that opening an English language center would be beneficial”, said Mr Salaha Babakr Hussein, head of the mentioned center.

It is to be mentioned that an English language certificate is an essential requirement to apply for a master’s degree, and according to Ministry of Higher Education regulations each applicant requires to present at least 160 hours in the class to be qualified to apply for a master’s degree at public universities. At University of Raparin, however, students usually take 295 hours all the way through the course and more than 100 students had been given English language certificate by our center, most of whom were employees of University of Raparin; having applied for master’s degree at Kurdish public universities, hopefully an outstanding number of applicants were offered a chance to study. Any applicant intending to take a language course at our center has to meet the requirements for master degree, including meeting two years of employment and overall bachelor’s score should be no less than 65%. Regarding the center’s teaching staff, all of them are foreign academic lecturers.

Pertaining to the center’s revenues, Mr. Salah pointed out: the income of the center is in dispute right away, but hopefully the issue will be resolved and we wait for the instructions from Ministry of Higher Education. Apart from English language courses, further foreign language courses will be available at our university; besides, we are going to arrange special seminars and workshops for Raparin University’s contemporary English teaching staff in an attempt to standardize English language as the academic and teaching language at our university.

Translated by

Sirwan Hassan

11/12/2014