Bring the fun back to the teaching of English

Johan Jaaffar
New Straits Times
07-11-2009
Bring the fun back to the teaching of English
Byline: Johan Jaaffar
Edition: Main/Lifestyle
Section: Main Section

A JAPANESE friend told me it was almost pointless to get Japanese of his generation to be competent in English. After all, at the height of the Japanese economic miracle, others came to them to learn all about things Japanese, including the language. But that is changing. The Japanese are beginning to feel they are being left out of the world because of their lack of competency in English. At one time, Japanese businessmen would rather use interpreters in public functions though they were quite proficient in English.

Today, English is a tsunami creating havoc in many notoriously monolingual societies. The world is going the English way, more so now than ever.
The Internet has made English the undisputable lingua franca of the cyberworld. Even Koreans, Germans and Chinese are realising the importance of English. In these countries, English classes are sprouting like mushrooms after torrential rain. Mastering English is no longer an option, it is a necessity.

I am not going to argue over the merits of reversing the decision on the teaching of Science and Mathematics in English (better known by its Bahasa Malaysia abbreviation PPSMI). There is good in the decision. After all, BM is the national language and the medium of instruction in our schools. For many years. the language has proven its ability to be a bahasa ilmu or language of knowledge.

The Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP) had for the last 50 years been entrusted with the planning and development of BM. It has built the language corpus and helped coin close to a million terminologies in almost every conceivable discipline known to man.

But the issue here is not about BM, it is about English. The prime minister has made it known that the decision to revert to BM does not undermine the government's effort to make Malaysians more proficient in English. The argument before the decision was that the two subjects were not the best vehicles to increase English proficiency among students.

The decision was made in view of the deteriorating standard of English competency among our people. We are losing our competitive edge on the negotiating table. Our scholars are lost in translation. Malaysians were once exemplary users of English.

What went wrong? Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, the minister of education, was asking aloud how come grammar, as we knew it, was not taught in our schools. The emphasis, to his horror, is "communicable English", whatever that means.

So, those things we learnt back then in schools about past and present tenses, or those lengthy discussions on past continuous or past perfect tenses, are out. I am not sure what is the best way to learn English. Perhaps the way of my generation was too tedious. Perhaps we learnt the difficult way or were simply not in line with today's new pedagogical slant.

When I went to an English primary school in 1960, I knew only three English words, "yes", "no" and "all right", though not necessarily in that order. There wasn't a kindergarten to prepare me for the basics. Since I was the first boy to enrol in an English school in the village - the only English school between the towns of Muar and Batu Pahat in Johor - no one could help me with my language skills. I was on my own.

When the English teacher, whose name incidentally was Mr Gun, an Englishman with an attitude and a penchant for using the cane, announced on my first day at school that he would not tolerate any other language spoken in the school compound, I was in a mute mode for almost three months.

But I learnt English the fun way. I learnt to describe whether it was a sunny day or a rainy day. It was "nature study" in English. And, of course, the nursery rhymes. Humpty Dumpty; Baa Baa Black Sheep; Hickory, Dickory, Dock; Jack and Jill and The Mulberry Bush opened my new horizon.

I went back to my village showing off the nursery rhymes I learnt in school. Imagine Javanese boys and girls circling a rambutan tree sounding "Here we go round the mulberry bush". It was surreal. Nursery rhymes created for boys and girls in a land 8,000km away became a daily staple in a village far from the English-speaking world. And in accented Javanese. My friends, too, had fun.

Perhaps Muhyiddin ought to bring the fun back to the teaching of English in our schools. Bring back the nursery rhymes and dramas. Let them play, act and converse in English. Make the students feel they are actually learning an interesting subject, not a boring one. Unlike riding a bicycle, language acquisition demands more than just a simple mastery of skills. Language is complex. Mastering one is not easy. But that is no excuse to make language teaching boring.

For non-native speakers, English is never easy. Even to this day, after having spoken the language for more than 40 years, I am still mindful that English is my second language. There are times of hesitation and doubt. Language mastery is a lifelong obsession. But the mantra that English is not difficult must be told to rural students, especially.

Perhaps we ought to learn from Normah Nordin, formerly a protege of the legendary stage actor Mustapha Noor, on her initiative to teach English the fun way. She created Artnest Studio to, among other reasons, encourage rural students in Muar to learn English. She experimented with a few schools, selecting poor students, and those with little language ability to join her class.

A few lessons later, she saw confidence in the students. They were able to converse in English. In fact, some of them were confident enough to perform a play in English, much to the delight of parents and teachers alike. The Artnest experiment should be replicated all over the country. I am sure there are many more such initiatives among NGOs. But Normah needs help.

At the official level, Muhyiddin must revamp the entire English syllabus. Go back to basics. Learn English the way many of us learned the language. Except for new terminologies and phrases, the rules governing the language have not changed much. Make the student believe that English is not just another subject to pass, but a language to equip oneself for better things in life. Or else it doesn't make sense why our students, after studying at least 100,000 minutes of English from Standard One to Form Five, cannot even construct a simple sentence in English.

That is mind-boggling.

(Copyright 2009)