Weekend English classes? What for?
The proposal made by the deputy prime minister who is also the education minister, Muhyddin Yassin recently that schools would be instructed to organize weekend English classes or tuitions to facilitate students who are weak in this language had received strong objections from all parties.
While we all do agree that the students' proficiency in the English language is still lacking behind, despite so many efforts in promoting and enhancing the use of this language, conducting such weekend classes or tuitions are not the concrete solution. Even the teachers' union and the parents are against such efforts as they had already saw the ineffectiveness in the previous programs.
It created more problems and burdens to these teachers who are now already overworked and coupled with a lots of unnecessary documentations in their daily work. And so does the students, with no enough rests or peace of mind during weekends.
Furthermore, we do not think that the majority of schools are still lacking so bad in their daily English language programmes. The percentage of those weak ones are mostly of those from the rural areas while the urban institutions had so far demonstrated their maturity in this language at a very fast pace.
We could see very clearly that it is those national schools who are still lacking far behind in their English learning abilities just because most of this kind of schools do not really show their interest in developing their students with this language. That is why they could not progress any further.
Therefore, the government, particularly the education ministry should not blame the entire schooling system for the ineffectiveness of the English language enhancement in only certain schools. You are putting it into such way to merely cover-up the weaknesses of the minority in order to justify the rolling of the public funds unnecessarily into the hands of your cronies, isn't it so?
Getting foreign English teachers to teach this language to our students? What about our local English teachers? Are they all too useless to even start off with a simple word? What can the foreign English teachers really do to help getting our students to improve their English proficiency? What kind of foreign English teachers do you want to employ? The British or Americans or both?
And if this happens, it will be clearly another sets of blatant abuse of power and mismanagement of the public funds at large. As such, this is a clear No as the effort would not really generate any outcome in the end.
Learning the English language is clearly an effort and initiative. It depends on will that person want to properly teach or are the individual school authorities really serious about developing this language onto their students or otherwise. If you are not interested, care less about this language or its programmes, no matter how much funds you put into, would not succeed in producing a best English speaking student up on the stage to speak up without even need to read some of its words.
And to the education minister again, if you are really interested in getting the English language up to a standard of being recognized, you should have done it long ago instead of now. No one will believe that after almost 54 years you still can't even learn how to teach the English language effectively.
Don't play too much politics in English language please!
