The Lack of English Teaching in Malaysian Schools: What I have experienced

What I have gone through of my school days, I have found there are a few elements can be highlighted why the students especially Malay cannot speak and write fairly good in English.

We can accept that the students can not speak well in English because their environment is Malay spoken. Normally in National Schools they don’t have any friend from the other races such as Chinese and Indian whom they can try to practice to speak English. The only chance they can speak English is to their English Teachers or to the non-Malay teachers if any in the school. However yet we can improve the English teaching by identified the best method to this type of students.

The shy feeling they had and fear to make mistake also not courage them speaking in English to their Malay friends and their teachers. What the best we could done to solve this problem is to put much time on speaking when they are in the English classroom. Not just one way communication as always practiced before where teacher speak to his/her students but courage them to speak among themself. The teacher could create some activities which their student can use English language to conduct the activities.

With the time table which contains one period per day for English subject we don’t see why they cannot speak fluent English by they come out after 11 years in schools if the stress of English speaking is given priority.

If we can provide them with very basic skill of English speaking and build a confident in his/herself surely they can practice the language to foreign tourist or maybe to Chinese or Indian who can speak in English. By this way they can develope their language skills and definitely they can speak English fluently.

The way we teach English in Malaysia should be different from the English be thaught in England or in America. We have the different environment from those countries so certainly we have to apply different approach in order to achieve the success in English teaching.

The second important beside speaking skill should be stressed in English is writing. As long as I remember the English teachers in schools never ask me to write a composition. Compare to Bahasa Malaysia subject I were asked do a lot of compositions. No wonder we good at Malay writing but worst at English writing. By looking at their student work of compositions the teachers could monitor the skill of their students’ writing and then from it they could find the ways to improve their student writing.

Compare to speaking , writing doesn’t need much time done in the classroom. The teachers can ask their student do the composition at home and only give some comments what the mistake they had done when they back in the classroom.