Those who attended Form 5 in 1979 were the last batch using English as a medium of teaching and learning in schools. Some were introduced to the language at home as their parents spoke English to them while others began learning it at kindergarten back then.
We started spelling in Standard One, while reading and writing comprehension, and dictations were from Standard Three. By Standard Four, we were speaking and writing English quite well. I remember we had comprehension, dictations and spelling until we were in Standard 6. We graduated from saying, “Teacher, teacher, can I go out to pass water?” to “Teacher, may I be excused?”
I was in that 1979 batch. We didn’t have a choice really. We had to learn the language because all subjects, with the exception of Bahasa Malaysia and Agama, were taught in English. We were also fined by our teachers if we spoke Malay outside our Bahasa Malaysia classes.
Parents, too, pushed their children to learn the language. A friend of mine told me his father had taped the bottom part of the television screen to block out the Bahasa Malaysia subtitles to get his children to listen to and learn from the English programmes.
Post-1979, there was no longer the push factor, especially among Malays, to learn English. All subjects in school were taught in Bahasa Malaysia. Some English programmes on television, especially those targeting children, were dubbed into Bahasa Malaysia.
So, I was not really surprised when Education Minister Datuk Seri Mahdzir Khalid, in a written reply to a question posed to him in Parliament recently, said teachers and students were not ready for the implementation of a compulsory passing grade in English for the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) and PT3 examinations. Furthermore, Deputy Education Minister Datuk P. Kamalanathan reportedly said that 15,000 teachers in the country were found to be ill-equipped to teach English.
I strongly believe that the English language has to be introduced very early in a child’s life. We are not born speaking a particular language. It is a skill we acquire by reading, listening and speaking.
Despite being in an English medium school through two years of pre-school, six years of primary education and five years of secondary school, I can say that it did not erode my comprehension of Bahasa Malaysia. Non-Malays in my 1979 batch can still converse in their mother tongues.
It is quite disappointing to see how the comprehension of the English language has deteriorated among school students and even teachers. I witnessed this myself when I was asked to be on a panel of judges for an essay writing competition among students of a school from an east coast state sponsored by a government-linked company. All the students had to do was write a 200-word essay about their experience flying on an aeroplane to Kuala Lumpur. It would, I think, be a simple task for a student from an urban area, but this was not so for those coming from the rural area, whose exposure to English is contained to just in their classrooms.
One student used the word “funny” throughout her essay to describe how fun the trip was. Another drew clouds in his essay as he did not know how to spell the word. One student wrote, in very bad English, how difficult it was to write. Most of the primary school students wrote about eating and how yummy the KFC dinner was for them. It was probably easier for them to write about food than their first flying experience. And teachers, too, refused to speak English in their presentations, preferring to speak in Malay instead.
And, I remember how enthusiastic a group of children were when a group of New Straits Times volunteers went to their school during a flood relief mission to conduct English lessons. We sang songs and nursery rhymes in their class. We conducted activities using our newspapers. They were asked to spell words, ranging from easy ones to difficult ones, to search for words in the newspaper based on our pronunciations and cut out words which had similar meanings to the ones we gave them. At the end of the session, they asked us why their own English classes were not as fun as ours. Students are eager to learn. Teachers must be qualified to teach the language and make English classes interesting for them.
English can not only make our children bilingual (in the case of non-Malays, trilingual), but also more employable outside Malaysia.
So, if we were to go back to the question as to whether our students and teachers will ever be ready for English, I do not think so, especially if the authorities keep changing policies on the use of the language in schools.
We should make the policy and stick to it, come hell or high water.
Fauziah Ismail is a United Nation’s Journalism fellow and Wolfson College Cambridge press fellow. She has 30 years of experience as a journalist, half of which with the Business Times