Sunday, December 14, 2014

English : Struggling And Bungling

Star Q
I read with awe the huge headline which summed up what the Deputy Prime Minister said recently; the location and purpose of which escapes my mind.  Not that they are important anyway.  More importantly however, a realistic look at the reasons why many young Malaysians struggle and bungle in English.

The first reason why our young citizens are unable to get a good grasp of the language is they do not find any realistic use of the language in their daily lives,  They do not see the purpose in learning English which can bring any kind of profit to them in their future lives.  In short, they do not need the language to survive in Malaysia.  This is because every where they turn to and every thing they do in this country is done in the national language (no disrespect intended)  Hence, these young people come to a realistic conclusion that if they can survive and make a living in this country by being monolingual, then there is no need for a second language.

There is no doubt that when you talk about daily use, you fall back on the parents' responsibilities in getting their children to use the language, which brings me to the second reason.  A small survey done among a group of secondary school students revealed that parents do not buy English newspapers for their children to read.  Even more surprising most parents do not buy newspapers at all!  Watching English programmes and movies on television is no help either because there are the subtitles for the children to read.  And talking about reading, if a family is lucky enough to have parents who buy books for their children to read, most of the time these books are not in English!

Thirdly, is the ever changing education system.  I myself have gone through several education systems from the Penyata Razak, to the KBSM, to the PPSMI, to the MBMMBI and now KSSR/KSSM in the midst of the PPPM.  Let's not go too far back.  Let's just start with PPSMI.  It was put to sleep and buried in its grave even before the system reached its pinnacle; before the young pioneers who went through the system could even see their own success.  Then there was MBMMBI.  Not sure what's happening with it because KSSR crept in quietly and is reaching students in Year 5 in 2015!

And to top it all off, there are teachers who teach English but are not proficient in English.  I am of the opinion that students need some technicalities in language learning like sentence structures and parts of speech in order to produce grammatically correct sentences even though the focus of our education is inclined towards communication.  But that does not necessarily mean that you can sacrifice good grammar for shoddy, incorrect structures as long as message gets across.  I am also of the opinion that at a certain point in a student's life in school, there has to be some kind of examination.

In order to achieve all this, students need teachers who are proficient in English.  Two bit teachers posing as English teachers or teachers who are forced to teach English because there is not enough English teachers  in schools should never be allowed to become the norm because in the end, the students will lose out.  And you cannot expect these teachers to be taught good grammar and later become proficient in it, in any amount of given time since it is not easy to teach old dogs new tricks!

I can go on about this forever, but let's face it.  Does the government really care about the sad state of our young people's English?  You can bring in any number of English teachers from any country in the world an still not address the situation precisely.  Go for the jugular; students, the parents and the teachers.  Focus on them.  Forget about changing the system ever so often and forget about fostering bilateral ties by bringing teachers from other countries.

Focus on these three important set of people in this country and we'll see what happens.  Somebody will surely be baffled again, but in a positive way!










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