SUMMARY OF ACTION RESEARCH CONDUCTED BY CAROLINE VAL MADIN,

SM ST MARY LIMBAHAU, PAPAR

TITLE: USING MALAY LANGUAGE IN TEACHING ENGLISH IN A LOW
PROFICIENCY CLASS

Teaching English is not easy as it is a second language used in Malaysia.

Teachers mostly are having big problems when they are posted in rural area where
people are not exposed to this language. The problems arise when they have to
teach and expose the students to the language but mostly the students cannot
understand and they have to use their mother tongue, usually a Malay language to
give explanation and make them understand. When its happened, the real purpose
to expose and teach them in the English language cannot be fully achieved. Thus,
Caroline has known her concern and she has preferred to collect information using
target group which has a numerous number of low proficiency students in English
language. She has used questionnaire as a tool to collect the data which is divided in
3 sections. What she has found is really relevant to her research which is the
students speak Malay or their mother tongue about 99.6 % at home. However, most
of the students are aware about an importance of English language in most cases
especially in finding jobs. Hence, they love to learn English and they insist not to use
Malay language during English class. The checklist or the data is analysed at three
stages of teaching which are the Introduction Stage, the Production Stage, and the
third stage as well as second stage. This is to provide more details on the using of
Malay language during teaching English language. The final method used by
Caroline is the lesson plan activity. After all data has been collected and analysed,
she finds out that the use of Malay language in her teaching for low proficiency class
is necessary to assist the students comprehension and understanding in the learning
of English.

Summarised by:
Mohammad Safwan Sudin
7PISMP TESL 1