ENGLISH TEACHERS: Audit first

2009/07/14

LIONG KAM CHONG, Seremban

THE Education Ministry recently announced that up to RM5 billion would be allocated to promote the teaching and learning of English. By any measure, this is a large amount and serves to underscore the seriousness of the government in wanting to improve English proficiency among our schoolchildren.
The number of English teachers will be increased by some 14,000. More teachers will be sent to rural areas where they are most needed.

Some 1,000 foreign teachers, whose first language is English, will be recruited to teach at "disadvantaged" schools.

Retired English teachers will be recalled to serve. English teaching periods will be increased in primary and secondary schools. English literature will be introduced at different levels of schooling. There will also be language labs to complement these efforts.

These announcements sound encouraging, more so, I believe, to young parents and our children in schools. But, wait a minute. Haven't we heard all this before?

Ever since the medium of instruction switched from English to Bahasa Malaysia in the 1970s, politicians and education officials have been telling us about programmes and projects they had implemented to promote English and to ensure that our children were provided with the facilities to learn English.

Their actions were no different from what is promised today. Millions had also been spent. A large number of teachers were sent to English-speaking countries for so-called "immersion" programmes.

The fact is no lesser amount of money was spent in all those earlier programmes.

But today, we are still crying for better proficiency in English. English-proficiency standards have hit rock bottom among our schoolchildren and university graduates.

It has deteriorated despite all the promises and programmes. Also, the English standard of rural pupils continues to lag far behind that of their urban counterparts.

Millions have been spent but the status quo remains. Something is amiss.

I think it is only logical that before the Education Ministry goes on another spending spree to improve English proficiency, an audit be done on what has happened to all the teachers and officials who were beneficiaries of the earlier programmes. How fruitful have they been? How effective were all those programmes?

Most important of all, how can we use the experience of the past to ensure the success of the new programmes that the education minister outlined last week when he announced the demise of the PPSMI (teaching of Mathematics and Science in English) policy?