In a primary school in the village Baradabar Jeleypara, 80km west of Kolkata, a class of five-year-olds have pushed their benches along the walls of their classroom. They and their teacher, Dilip Bera, have turned the open space in front of them into a makeshift stage on which they can act, dance and sing in English.
After a question-and-answer session to warm up, the children take to the floor. To their delight Bera hops, skips and turns, and with each movement asks: "What am I doing?" They chant back, following his steps.
For this class of 35 children, all of whom live below India's official poverty level, this dynamic first encounter with the English language has become entirely normal since they started school in May. That is when they and 3 million other first-year students across the state of West Bengal began using a new coursebook and syllabus designed to develop their confidence as speakers and users of English.
But for the majority of the 150,000 teachers in the state's primary schools, the style of teaching demanded by the new syllabus, with its emphasis on using English in class to teach, will present significant challenges. Yet the stakes couldn't be higher. After two decades during which English language teaching was banned in primary schools, West Bengal has woken up to the fact that it needs to re-engage with a language that is now recognised as a key to economic development.
Recently published research by US-based economists Tanika Chakroborty and Shilpi Kapur compared the earnings of populations in Indian states that continued to teach English in primary schools. They suggest that a 1% increase in English ability raises weekly wages by 1.6%. West Bengal's restriction on English language teaching since 1983, they say, has led to a 68% reduction in wages.
Economic need might be great, but the strongest impetus for gaining English is coming from the bottom up, from parents who now recognise the language as a key to their children's future prosperity.
The clearest evidence of parent power in the nationwide push to learn English can be seen in the numbers of children who are being moved out of the state education system, where English is taught as a second language, and into fee-paying English-medium schools. Some estimate that 54% of children in urban areas are being educated in the English-medium private system and the numbers in rural areas are increasing by 2% a year.
In West Bengal the government hopes that its new English syllabus will convince parents that it can deliver English as effectively as the private sector.
The task is a huge one. Very few teachers outside the main urban centres speak any English and the current syllabus, introduced in 2000, when the state ended its ban on English-language classes, uses Bengali as the language of instruction. At best it has produced students who have learned the structure of English, but they are not the confident speakers of the language employers are asking for.
West Bengal's strategy has been to start from scratch. It is working with the British Council, the UK's international agency for education and cultural relations, to write and produce a complete primary syllabus for ELT that embraces communicative language teaching methods. The aim is to get learners using English from their first lesson and to convince teachers that, even if their own command of English is limited, they can bring English alive in their classrooms.
The complete series of course books is due to be delivered to all classes up to age 11 by December 2009, but it is teachers such as Bera who are at the frontline in closing the skills gap in classrooms. Bera is among a group of 300 "master trainers" who have been trained in how to use the new materials and methodology and are now passing on those skills to teachers across the state's 16 education regions.
He says students can be encouraged to speak in English in class through actions, songs and role-play. Now he needs to convince other teachers to overcome their inhibitions and suspicions.
"We have a long belief that learning a second language is difficult," he says. "Most of us can read and write in English but when it comes to communicating we are in a shell."
The message he takes to teachers is that they must join their students on their English-language learning path, but he is realistic about how fast their journey will be. "What is the secret to learning? I say love this language. You will get fluent bit by bit," he explains.
The "cascade" training model that the British Council is using in West Bengal has been adopted by other states looking to retrain large numbers of teachers quickly. The Council's target is to train 750,000 teachers across India in this way by 2013.
In the Delhi regional area the Council is helping to run a cascade training scheme that has so far instructed 400 teachers in how to deliver communicative teaching skills to a further 4,000 teachers in local government- run schools. Delhi's rapid urban and industrial growth may give it economic advantages over West Bengal – spending per capita on education in Delhi is twice the average of other states – but the urgency to improve English language teaching in state schools is the same.
Rina Ray, Delhi's secretary for education admits the region's 2,700 state schools were in crisis by 2005. State education had been written off as a failure and the government was considering bowing to political pressure to hand over money for education direct to parents allowing them to access private schools. "We asked parents what they wanted from schools and their response was overwhelmingly: the same English language teaching skills as in the private sector," says Ray.
Now she wants the cascade training programme to achieve rapid improvement in students' communication skills in English and training teams will start passing on new classroom skills to teachers early next year.
However, a planning meeting for around 30 master trainers at the Council's offices in Delhi last month highlighted some of the difficulties ahead. "About 90% of the teachers in my school just turn up. They are not interested in teaching. For them this is just a job," one of the trainers said.
Another voiced a widespread concern about persuading colleagues to embrace a new teaching style while they are still using the same course books and tests. "A lot of our teachers have been teaching for many years and their students are passing their tests. They have little reason to change."
• Max de Lotbinière, editor of Learning English, travelled to India as a guest of the British Council. All editorial content is independent of the Council.