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I have been told since young that English is very important. My father constantly reminded my brother and I to master the English language, and my mother encouraged us to watch English cartoons and read English storybooks to strengthen our English foundation. Our family’s conversations were also mostly in English, so as to let my brother and I learn how to speak English fluently. Today, I must thank my parents’ careful guidance, for without it English would not be one of the languages that I can communicate in, and I would not be able to read, listen, speak and write in English. Ironically, it was also the careful guidance mentioned above that would lead to many amusing incidences between my brother and I, and certain former English teachers of ours.
When my brother was in kindergarten, his English teacher once attempted to educate her students on the names of various human body parts. She pointed to her cheeks, and said, “This is ‘chin’,” then she proceeded to point to her chin, and said, “This is ‘cheek’.” My brother immediately pointed out that she had mixed the two body parts up, to which she insistently replied that she was not wrong. When my brother went home, he told our parents about this, and my mother went to the kindergarten to ask about this matter. The teacher said she would check it up, but in the end the matter remained unresolved, and the teacher continued to let her poor kindergarten students confuse their “cheeks” with their “chins”.
When I went to secondary school, I realized that the English syllabus I was to learn was almost the same with my primary school English syllabus. To my surprise, we were learning “a, an, the” and “this, that, those”…All over again. I remember a particular question that appeared on one of my secondary school English exam papers – “He works as an engineer in ____ United Kingdom,” and we were to choose from “a”, ‘an”, “the”, and “-“ to fill in the blank. I confidently chose “the” as my answer. Well, it turned out that I got that answer wrong. My English teacher maintained that the answer was “-“(so the whole sentence was supposed to be “He works as an engineer in United Kingdom”). I went home and asked my parents just to be sure, then I asked my aunt who had previously studied at the UK before, then I proceeded to ask my grandaunt who was previously an English teacher…And they all said the answer was “the”. Satisfied, I once again went to my English teacher regarding this matter, but he replied (a tad impatiently) that he had copied that question from an English reference book, so it was impossible that the answer could be wrong. With that, the matter was put to an end. There remained a cross on that question on my exam paper, and my English exam marks was lower than it should have been, but most importantly, my fellow classmates were under the impression that the answer was “-“. At the end of the year, my father went to school and kindly requested the teacher to stop misleading his students. The teacher resigned soon after that.
These are only two simple examples, and if I were to write down every amusing incident of this kind, I could go on for pages. The issue that Mr. Lim Mun Fah brought up is, “How to improve our children’s English skills?” There are many English teachers who make it a rule that students may not use any other language than English during English lessons. This rule ought to have given students an opportunity to converse in English, and would also help them overcome communication problems they may face in their future careers. However, when students use wrong grammar and are not corrected by their teachers, or their teachers are using wrong grammar themselves, then the plan would have backfired, as this would result in students growing accustomed to using the wrong grammar. Other than that, some schools implement “dynamic teaching” and “e-learning” for English, and persistently claim that it is “effective” and “modern”…But they fail to explain why students who fail in English continue to fail after all these implementations. Suggestions to “improve our children’s English skills” have been put forward continually by many people. But the problem we now face is, the English teachers who are truly responsible for carrying out these suggestions, some of their English standards are worse than their students! Under these circumstances, how indeed are we supposed to improve Malaysians’ English skills?
My father said that according to certain studies conducted by education experts, the number of English words commonly used in our everyday life is approximately 5000 words. If teachers could teach these 5000 words during English lessons, would that not be more beneficial to the students? That would beat learning “a, an, the” every year, right? After I left my secondary school to further my studies, the biggest change I faced was every subject was taught in English. Our textbooks were in English, our lecturers gave lectures in English, our tutorials and assignments were all done in English. Those students who did not have a good foundation in English were constantly found flipping their dictionaries looking for the meanings of unfamiliar words. Isn’t it a big disadvantage for students to try and master the English language only when they reach this stage?
Many people say that the English standards of Malaysians have been declining, but my father says that it is actually the English standards of Malaysian English teachers that have been declining every year. When the English teacher who is supposed to help their students master English imparts erroneous teachings, who are the students supposed to turn to for help? Teachers ought to guide their students towards the right path, but when they themselves do not know where that path is, is this not a case of “the blind leading the blind”? If this situation continues, then I would say that the future looks bleak for the learning of English in our country.
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