The current situation and issues of the teaching of English in Malaysia

Malaysia has gone through vast changes in various fields since it attained its independence from Britain in 1957. Among these changes were implementations of policies related to educational syllabus and the medium of instruction where languages were used to impart knowledge. The country had inherited a divide-and-rule system from the colonial era where schools in the past were set up along ethnic lines and conducted in different languages. Hence, education in Malaysia has been multilingual. During pre-independence, primary schools were available in four medium of instruction, namely English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil. During post-independence, Bahasa Malaysia (Malay) was declared the sole national language in 1967. However, severe race riots occurred in May 1969, which catalysed a change in the education system where all English medium schools were instructed to phase out. National Language and National Educational Policies were implemented gradually from 1970 until 1983 in primary and secondary level of education. The Third Malaysia plan states that Bahasa Malaysia (Malay) is the basis for national integration and English is taught as a second language. Schools adopted a few approaches in teaching English. However, certain problems were overlooked in the teaching of English during nationalisation of schools, for example students who came from non-English medium background were given little consideration, approaches used in teaching English, and the fact that English was taught as just another subject. The English medium of instruction was reintroduced in National schools in 2002 and a bilingual system was set up with English used for the teaching of Science and Mathematics. Very recently, it was announced that the teaching of Science and Mathematics in English will be phased out from 2012 since the government was convinced that it was not working well. Supporters and critics of the move voiced out their opinions. In the current scenario as far as the teaching of English is concerned, Malaysia faces a number of challenges. Firstly, it has to produce or make available enough competent teachers to teach English lessons in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) and ESL (English as a Second Language) settings. Secondly, it has to find the best approach of teaching English to multilingual students, and thirdly, it has to train Mathematics and Science teachers to teach well in English.