No colonial hang-ups as Malays rush to learn English
By Baradan Kuppusamy
TAMPIN (Malaysia): It is three o’clock in the afternoon on a normal weekday in this small town, about 110 kilometres south of the national capital, and Hafsiah, 9, and her brother Badrul, 12, are tearing up the stairs of a three-storey shop house to enter a room full of students eager to learn English. Many of the children are still in regular school uniforms and have not had time to change but they are ready for another session of learning in a scene that is commonplace these days in rural Malaysia that is dominated by the country’s indigenous Malays.
So keen are Hafsiah and her brother, as also many of the other students, that they have not returned to their homes in nearby villages for lunch but stayed on in Tampin town with stomachs growling, so they do not miss their precious English language coaching session. English, once shunned as the language of colonialism, is now regarded as the passport to success in the modern world and is rapidly replacing Islamic studies and the sciences.
“My parents say English is the key to the future and that we have to master it,” Hafsiah told IPS after the session. “But it (English) is so strange to the tongue”. Apparently, the difficulties that Malays have in competing in a rapidly globalising world is being attributed by the older generation to their failure to master English and even to turning their backs on the language in 1970 in a wave of nationalism.
Malays form slightly more than 50 per cent of Malaysia’s 23 million people with the economically dominant ethnic Chinese forming 22 per cent and concentrated in the urban centres where the English language has survived better. Indians who form another seven per cent of the population are also largely urban. The frenzy to catch up with English in rural Malaysia is more than just palpable and nowadays second only to the craze for English football and the popular ‘Malaysian Idol’ contest. Signs of the frenzy are everywhere. Bookshops are stacked high with volumes of dry English grammar.
Newspapers are promoting English by giving out free copies to schools and businesses are donating millions of dollars to adopt entire schools and pick up the tab so that the students can have an English education. “We should not be shy to say English is a Malaysian language,” said Education Minister Hishammuddin Hussein recently while launching a new scholarship programme that provides English language resources to 290 rural and semi-urban schools. English may have been the language of the colonial masters, Hussein said, “but it was also the language which our founding fathers acquired, took to London, and returned as masters of their own land”.
Earlier, when Malay nationalism was at a high and learning the Malay language considered sacrosanct, such a statement would have quickly ended the minister’s political career.
English continued to be taught as a second language in rural Malaysia but its quality declined because of official hostility and poor teaching resources. That climate has now reversed dramatically and the study of English is nowadays being actively promoted by officialdom and receiving a matching response as well. It all started in 2002 when some Japanese investors told former Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad that many Malaysian graduates were so poor in English that they were simply unemployable. There were serious communication problems. While Japanese factory managers had learned English, Malaysian graduates had not.
“You don’t expect us to learn Malay language to communicate with our workers,” one Japanese manager famously asked of government officials. “Even in China, the Chinese are rushing to learn English”. But that is a situation familiar across Asia where former British colonies like India are competitively attracting international investors because of significant numbers of English-knowing professionals. In Malaysia, about 20,000 graduates are estimated to be unemployed because of poor communication skills.
Many graduates had begun to hide their degree certificates and take lower-paying jobs for which they are considered ‘overqualified’. Mahathir realised that if the trend continued, Malaysia’s position as a vibrant, trading economy would be badly affected. So, he decided on a fast track scheme to bring English to rural students.
And without careful preparation and ignoring stiff, all- round opposition, he announced that from 2003 onwards all schools must teach key subject like science and mathematics in English. Opposition lawmakers, education experts and Chinese and Tamil language teachers warned that student performance would drop dramatically if a switch is made in such a sudden manner and without planning. They argued that teachers, who had been teaching science and mathematics in Malay, Mandarin and Tamil languages for over 30 years, cannot overnight teach in English.
Mahathir was both impatient and adamant. He said modern technology, use of Internet and special teaching software would be employed to make the overnight switch work.
As the experts had predicted, the performance of rural Malay students had dropped when they were forced to switch to English as the medium of instruction in science and mathematics. More Malays were not making the grade to enter colleges, polytechnics and universities largely because of the sudden switch. —Dawn/Inter-Press Service
