Star Q
There is indeed a lot of fuss nowadays about the proficiency of our children in English Language. It has become a normalcy to here people from all quarters, from the ministers to the layman, from fishmongers to doctors, blaming teachers for this sad predicament.
All their fingers point to the teachers and everything is done to scrutinize and highlight every single flaw and weakness the teachers teaching English have, if only to cover their own flaws. So, we get these English teachers being put through tests after tests and courses after courses, supposedly by people who think they are more capable in teaching English and think they would probably be better at it.
I happened to read a small quote in a small newspaper report somewhere in the middle of this thick newspaper (obviously not the main news!) where a not-so-well-known teacher (obviously) said that there should be a continuity of what the teachers teach in school and what students do at home.
The statement was simple and sweet (too simple that it may have been missed by most readers!) but there is a whole lot of truth in it. In order for students to find purpose in what they learn in school, they should be able to use it outside, especially at home. A good example is Mathematics. No one can deny that there is continuity of the Mathematics learned in school (well, maybe not all!) and at home. Students cannot avoid from using numbers. Televisions, cell phones, clocks and watches, clothes sizes and even portions of food, all use numbers! The direct link or continuity between Mathematics in school and at home is quite evident!
However it is totally the opposite with English. Teachers do their utmost best to teach their students to write essays, summaries, vocabulary, grammar plus the skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing (in English). But all the teachers effort fall flat on the their faces because the learning and usage of English (if any by the students) just stops there; at school!
We know that there is no continuity of the use of English at home because once students are in their comfort zone of using their mother tongues at home, they will revert to using Malay, Chinese, Tamil or what-have-you. Not only don't they speak English, they even watch programs in their mother tongue and even read newspapers and other reading materials in the same language.
Using mother tongue for more than twelve hours a day at home definitely beats the time that these students spend in school. And that twelve hours is definitely a lot compared to the forty-minute lesson that their teachers have with them (realistically speaking if the teacher has forty students in a forty minute lesson, then it is just one minute per student!)
So all those people who think they can be better teachers by coming up with things that teachers don't really need, blame your system, instead of blaming the teachers! You can put pressure on the English teachers by increasing the number of their teaching periods (let's say from 6 periods of English to 10 periods per week, which I heard is going to start in 2014!) but if you do not provide the continuity for students to use the language outside the school, at home especially, then the objective to increase the number of people proficient in English will be a failure!
Then again, when all else fail, they can always blame the teachers! Again!
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