I'd like to put a disclaimer on all the things I write that they cannot be supported, correlated and concluded the way you'd expect a 'credible' piece of writing ought to be. I'm not credible at all and have no ambitions of being a mekah of credibility. In a blogosphere of writing where every author is pretty confident in the validity of their perspective, to care none at all about whether or not I would appear 'credible' or 'noteworthy' seems radical even without trying to be.
I say the things that sophisticated and intellectual people, who are already set on the trajectory towards their own conclusions, would less likely say. The difficult thing about correlating and quoting accurately every point we're trying to present is that we lose everyone else in the course of it. There are enough academics, intellectuals and born-again-politicians/activists that can provide their own statistics and references to support the arguments they want to make. I can't see myself doing that and it is purely from a lack of trying.
When I write about my views on education and TEMS, I have to bear in mind that I am up against a well-educated, well-connected network of people who have been surfing the tide during those years when I was merely observing how and where the currents would flow while idly watching each sunrise and sunset.
A lot of times when I've attempted to write about issues that feel as if I was born to experience, I've held myself back because, working on an hourly wage and juggling single parenthood didn't give me enough time to collect enough references and digest enough journals and studies to quote extensively on every opinion I want to express. I suppose that can also be a reason why a lot of people produce questionable research design, implementations and results - it takes bloody a lot of time to select and screen target study groups, design and re-check question design and control for this and that....well, you get my point. They just need to come up with something that would 'validate' an opinion that has already been reached.
I don't go so far as to pick something out of my .....hair, but a lot comes from my solitary observation and readings from journals and most recent papers presented in ESL conferences around the world. I do not claim to have read every publication to date nor internalised all the findings synchronistically and coherently. If anyone is industrious enough, they can take time out and trawl through the sea of research and publications and eventually ...no, wait, I wouldn't recommend that. Research is an ever-expanding field. It can go either way for or against a theory depending on the time of the millenia. For that reason, I would rather each person appeal to their own inner reflections, trust their own insights in order to swim freestyle in any direction that benefits them most immediately.
Anyway.....
Right. There is this argument, authored by an M.Bakri Musa that goes it is now accepted that exposing children at a young age to bilingual education confers significant linguistic, cognitive and other advantages. The authors’ recommendation that pupils be taught only in their mother tongue and learn a second language later at a much older age is not supported by modern research.
I agree with half of the opinions he expressed in his entire article and appreciate the sort of analyszing and referencing he does that I would never find time to do. That is probably very necessary if he is going to be a credible author. Right, so yes, there is a lot of evidence to suggest bilingualism benefits children. But who are these types of bilingual children? For many years I've observed people who are bilingual and trilingual and they all have one thing in common - they come from homes which are generally more progressive in thinking and have more helpful psychological make-ups. You can also say they come from a lineage that is linguistically more gifted and diverse and cognitively more 'advanced'. I agree that there are great benefits to reap if you can be bi, tri and multi-lingual, etc etc etc. But does reverting to the medium of instruction in English facilitate this?
We seem to ignore the fact that we model language after what we are exposed to. The author said himself later on that if you teach bastardized language, you get bastardized language. The 'linguistic' and 'cognitive' advantageous our brains have do not come equip with a 'Standard Built-In Language Rules for the (year) child' that we can upgrade like a software. GIGA.....so to speak.
So we think we can effectively train teachers to ......undo their bastardization of the language (no fault of theirs), recalibrate and holify their English in.....how many man hours? As I observed from 1990 til 2005, I saw how we have passed the point of no return. But it takes a landslide for us to realize our slopes are naked, so.,,,,,,
People often ask me, as a child coming from a working class, dysfunctional Chinese family and schooled in the KBSM system, how did I gain the level of proficiency I have? If I told you I skipped all my English classes or slept through them, would you believe me?
I largely did not conform to the instruction nor absorb the environment English teaching was creating around me. No one else in my family nor my primary classmates, not even my American educated older brother, speaks and writes the way I do. In fact, my AF (affective filter) towards the learning of English in school was very high. I joined the English society because I was obligated to choose co-c activities and that was one society I could take it easy and not do anything worth doing. I remember the teacher advisor teaching me this word starting with 'z', - 'Zeal'. She said I had no zeal for learning English. Point taken then. During English Week, I was conscripted, rather than an eager participant. I attribute my autonomous learning traits and my proficiency in English to all those years of never conforming to what schooling expected of me and living with a label of being an underachiever. I could've been what they now term "a dysfunctional independent learner" but I'd like to think that I knew exactly what I wanted to learn, what I needed NOT to learn in order to achieve the sort of gratification I wanted from my learning experience.
No, we cannot train teachers as conveniently as we install new software or buy new RAM. Some English-ed teachers have written in newspapers about how they had to transition from being English-ed to teaching in BM and do not see why the current batch of teachers cannot do the same. Whether it had something to do with their 'training' or not, a lot of o-ty's assumed that the deterioration of minds has a direct relationship to denouncing the remnants of colonial indoctrination through education. Then why are schools in English-speaking countries suffering the same decline? And do we actually believe that the stronger economies of English-speaking countries has everything to do with English itself and nothing to do with trading policies etc?
Another factor that explains why the ol-ty's can do it but the current generation would find it more difficult is the way one language transfers up or down to another. This is no way marks a superiority of one language over another. If it did, we should all be reading and writing only in Arabic and Sanskrit and a whole host of other nominess even before we adopt English as our International Lingua-Franca.
It's a no-brainer that if your brain has already been accustomed to read and write / listen and speak in the more complexed system, it becomes easier to acquire language from a less complex system. That is only one aspect of language acquisition. Transfering from English to BM is generally a stepping down. The lack of informed approaches towards the teaching and learning of English to speakers of other languages and the continuous deterioration of minds through traditional schooling compounds the difficulty of current day teachers being able to acquire English.
Having said that, I would like to see these English-ed teachers transition to teach in Arabic or Mandarin and then see if they can still claim the same air of superiority. I suppose I cannot blame our English teachers - like what M.Bakri Musa pointed out, a lot of what our public teachers have access to is dated. I've always noted that the danger of being a teacher is a false sense of exclusivity and superiority about the 'subject' you teach. Teachers don't actually feel an obligation to empathise with others and keep themselves updated about learning before passing judgment on other people's unsuccessful learning.
I'm going to share a story told to me by a lady, we shall call her Cikgu Pah. She was a student of the famous Malaysian BM expert, Adibah Amin. Cikgu Pah was often told off during class for not being good at BM and that she should go back to Arab where she came from. This hurt the sensitivies of the young Cikgu Pah very much. (This is very typical of us insensitive Malaysians somehow. The other variant is "Go back to tiong-hua if you cannot speak Bahasa properly!" By properly they mean in RP Bahasa Malaysia.... their judgment of RP Bahasa Malaysia which is el supremo.) - So, anyway, by the time Cikgu Pah graduated, the policy had been revised to Bahasa as the medium of instruction. - The next scenario would seem familiar to many teachers : By virtue of being Malay and being conversant in Malay, she was seconded to teach Bahasa Malaysia on top of the subjects she had majored in. Those subjects she had majored in she learned in English and now she has to teach them in Bahasa.
What I mean by a familiar scenario is that I've noticed how School Heads decide which teacher teaches languages, especially English : first priority, the ones who are not Chinese, followed by those who might be Chinese but who were not completely schooled in Chinese and when both groups are not available, any teacher that can read the most words in Bahasa/English, even if it's still at a Ladybird series level. I mean no offence, but if you only worked in schools before, you'd know. No parent out there can realistically expect the conversant English/Malay speaker assigned to be their child's subject teacher to be an expert in language (L1 or L2) pedagogy. Once in a while, you would be so lucky as to get a Cikgu Pah who has a lot of initiative, drive, passion and commitment and a heart the size of........Alaska!
Back to my little piece of anecdotal story - Eventhough Cikgu Pah was more fluent in English than Bahasa then (coming from a well-educated, urban Malay family in the 50s) her transition to Bahasa was difficult but do-able. She wanted badly to tell her cikgu, "Hah, tengok! Sekarang saya jadi cikgu Bahasa Malaysia!"
Kind of like what I would like to say to my English teacher in Form 4. She told me to go be an English teacher if I think her methods of teaching my other classmates (I was not from the first class) were ineffective and destructive to their self-esteem and language development. Actually, the last thing I would want to be is an English teacher. I don't mind teaching literature and theatre on my free weekends but who needs Shakespeare when the rest of the third world needs applicable skills in acquiring knowledge in a fast-changing world?
Back to the comparison the group of retiring/retired teachers made about,"If we could do it then, why can't they do it now?". English to BM is a stepping down in terms of linguistic difficulty. On top of that, there was an existing cultural and social environment that was very condusive for learners who were self-directed in their learning. To be fair, all teachers should be self-directed. This was during a time when the teaching profession was the reserve of the most self-directed of students!!
The landscape for our teachers today is like climbing Mt.Kilimanjaro on stilettos compared to the skiing trip down an artifical Alps the teachers in the 60s experienced. On top of it being a stepping-up transitioning from BM to English, English is not as widely used now as Bahasa Malaysia was. Of course we can argue that with so much more English-media clutter and broader air/webspace in general dedicated to English, there's a greater environment. In mass, there is more...which necessitated also a new ability to manouvre around and filter through all that clutter and noise in order to select their prime sources of information.
Way back when, we had only a couple of channels and radio stations and print publications and they were either in Bahasa Malaysia or English. In fact, there was this radio subscription channel called Redifussion which broadcasted extra Chinese or English channels on top of the RTM ones. The scenario is vastly different today. Even in simulated environments like mass media, Astro channels and the dozens of paid broadcasting, multiple-language interface products, etc are competing for viewer attention. When given a choice, people would revert to the language they are most efficient in. I would never read a manual in Bahasa or set my Windows or google browser up in Bahasa if I had a choice! And I think even rural kids nowadays would rather read in Bahasa Malaysia than Jawi?
Besides, if I am not mistaken (you dig up the archives yourself) it was in the late 70s and full-throttle in the 80s when teaching colleges were synonymous as the last refuge of those who could not hack it for university courses. I remember being a very young girl running around Recsam eavesdropping on what teacher trainers go through and what they were like and trying to catch what visiting educators would lecture. By the time I finished secondary school, I told my dad that it would be over his dead body that I would become a teacher. I know now that we really must be careful what we say when we parlay with the Universe in rebelling against our parent's wish.
We simply cannot compare high-school leavers from the 50s and 60s with those from the later decades up til now. We're comparing high achievers like Cikgu Pah (schooled in the 50s and 60s) who got into undergrad and teaching diploma programmes on pure merit with mediocre achievers who got in on quotas and by virtue of having failed to get places in universities. To imitate my German friend's expression, "What is that for a comparison?"
High-achievers tend also to be more self-directed and have more initiative in their learning. Apple to apple, the first group would have transitioned better from BM to English when compared to the latter group. Mediocre achievers are constantly plagued with a quiet confession that they became teachers because that is the last respectable thing left for them to do. I hope everyone is aware though, that the way we perceive ourselves as learners from the time we first experience learning, greatly influences the initiative, resourcefulness and progressiveness of our future learning. Can we see now the many ways our teachers are handicapped?
Eventhough I am but a lowly lone-ranger, I am as guilty as our local academics and researchers in beginning with a conclusion and then looking only for the evidences which corroborate initial views. I knew trainee teachers were in a lot of trouble when it came to continuous learning, I knew different demographics predicted a general economic outcome due to a correlating lacking of proficiency in English. I knew almost instinctively that those who did not acquired enough mental lexicon, vocab and efficient reading and writing skills would most probably not enjoy post-secondary and the domino effect can settle in. (Fortunately, a lot of other factors can contribute to a change in a school-leaver's trajectory, if only they would let go of the unhelpful impressions they have acquired of themselves during school and replaced them with more helpful and positive beliefs after school.)
As a primary school student, I sympathised so much with my trainee Malay teachers who confessed how difficult it was for them to improve themselves because so much information is written in English. (That was in '85,'86). One Cikgu Sapiah gave me an English storybook to encourage me to continue on my then promising path of mastering English. She had told me how difficult it was for her and the only thing that kept her efforts up in English was reading romance novels which were a lot more 'interesting' than Malay ones. She gave me one of those. I never read it but I developed an aversion towards romance novels.
I also saw how many of my friends were falling behind in acquiring English and they were not the ones who copped out from doing homework and rested forehead on folded arms during English lessons. I integrated my passing observations of the sort of trainee teachers we were getting, the teachers we already had, the people outside of school who were their age groups, the areas where my friends lived, what jobs their parents did and whether I found any correlation between their school work, family backgrounds and their acquisition of English. I did that passively, day in and day out. There is no one clear episode, just a general theme of a memory I have of primary through lower secondary school.
It pained me that there has always existed a double-standard in the treatment of those who did better in English compared to those who didn't. This directly causes how a person values and perceives their ability as a learner, what is more, were were only children. Could the prejudice be remnants of teachers schooled during a time when English was the medium of instruction? It pained me even more that I put in none of the accepted norms of learning effort yet them, twice as much or more.
I started with two conclusions : There were two broad themes I concluded from my own reflections as a language learner within the KBSM system. First, the methods and approaches were deeply flawed. That was the only way to explain how my non-conformism to standard classroom norms saved me from language bastardization or fossilization. My English textbooks were always returned as new as they came, and I never came across any English exercise books during spring cleaning. Textbooks did next to nothing for my language acquisition. But it could have done something out of the thousands of others, maybe. But at the end of the race, my non-textbook, disengageed perspectives towards classroom learning of English put me miles ahead.
Second, a high sense of self-esteem is imperative in both the teacher and the learner in order to acquire language effectively. A teacher with a high self-esteem in their ability to teach and inspire in the subject is a safer bet to be more reflective, encouraging and supportive of his learner's language development.
There is a part of me which wishes I could be put into a state of hypnosis and regressed to my childhood to see how my learning happened. I've learned significantly a lot more things in the area of SLA and Learner Autonomy to understand a significant part of how I acquired my language. I always put out a disclaimer that my memories are fallible. But there is this memory of always reading a column by a Lucille Dass in The Star newspaper in the 80s. There was another teacher called a Miss Dass at my school at the same time. It always fascinated me that there was a Dass I could see who never spoke that intelligently to me, and a Dass I could read, who wrote so intelligently, whom I could not see. I never actually met Lucille Dass in person until about 20 years later and very briefly at a workshop.
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