MARCH 5 — Too many children start school and don’t speak English. That’s just not indicative of a flawed education system, but sadly also about teachers who mangle the language.
In a previous column, I wrote about how certain teachers conducted English classes in Bahasa Malaysia. Now, read this appeal for donations from a headmistress, and knock yourself out.
“Dear Sir/Madam. Donation and sponsorship for student exchange programme SMK……with…..High School (in Japan).
“Respectfully of the above, I as headmistress of…… I has approved this Japan education programme. I had look through the proposal prepared by my students will help in their education as well in their future.
If a school head can’t write proper English how does she expect her students to fare in the language? Where do children turn to grasp the English language?
The opening paragraph of her letter to donors and sponsors is a sign of how students are struggling to grapple with English language in schools.
It’s a lingering blight on the teaching of English in schools that continues to cause intense worry.
Clearly, government efforts to boost mastery of the language have been hindered by a severe lack of quality local English teachers.
Allow me to reproduce a letter by a parent who bemoaned the predicament of students during English lessons in a public school in Kuala Lumpur:
“My daughter started Year One in an old, established national school. On the first day of school, she was told not to speak English. She could only do so during English lessons.
“During English classes, the teacher addressed the pupils in Bahasa Malaysia. She conducted most of the lessons in BM and occasionally switched to English.
“When are kids, the future of the nation, supposed to learn to speak and write English?”
What if schools used video conferencing, where students from different classes tuned in to a real-time lesson being conducted by an English language teacher at another school?
It could be part of an immersion programme for students to improve their grip of the language. If we can get kids in their early years, bad English in schools will cease to be ridiculed.
At the moment the push to make the young proficient in English is patchy without qualified teachers.
In the meantime, shouldn’t teachers deficient in English language — or for the matter any subject — be kicked into the long grass?
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
