The Termination of English Language Usage in The Teaching and Learning of Mathematics and Science.

Points( Agree) many children from poor rural areas were being failed by the programme Urban candidates performed better than their rural counterparts, with 10.39% obtaining three to five As compared with 6.77% in rural areas, The teaching of maths and science in English the last six years has not improved the performance of students in those subjects, the education minister admitted today. There have been changes but the difference is nominal, said Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin He said there had only been a two to three per cent change since the policy was implemented in 2003. that the government is not fully prepared for the implementation of the policy and students are being victimised as a result. "It is apparent that they are not fully prepared for this and have not taken into account the implication and the repercussion," he told a press conference in Parliament the government realised the programme's failure only after six years it has been implemented. teaching maths and science in English won't upgrade students' English quality, suggesting that it would be better for the government to focus on getting the best teachers to teach the international language instead. learning science and maths in one's own mother tongue may be the most effective way to master these two subjects in the first few years of schooling when many students might not have the ability to understand instructions in English since most of them, apart from those in certain urban areas, have never come into contact with the language before. My own experience can probably illustrate that the best combination for any student is to learn maths and science in his mother tongue language at the primary level and in English in secondary schools. I was from the Chinese medium. In primary school, I learned maths and science in Mandarin, and by Standard 2 or 3 we were quite well verse with the multiplication table. When I went to a Chinese-medium secondary school Chung Ling High School in Penang these two subjects were taught in English. Most of us had no problem mastering and excelling in them. All six of us shared the distinction of being from the Chinese medium but were taught science and maths in English We have no problems at all adjusting to a milieu steep in English.

We never had any problems in the transition from a Chinese school to an English-language university. In my opinion, by Standard 4 certain technical and scientific terms in English should be slowly introduced to the students. So, while I welcome the teaching of these two subjects in the mother tongue language at the primary level, I would like to urge the minister of education to seriously reconsider the decision to do the same for the secondary level. We have one huge population of Malaysians whose English skills are poor to non-existent a smaller but sizable population whose English skills are very good Malaysia is 14th in the world when it comes to the number of people who speak English as a first language (such as myself), with about 380,000 native English speakers most of our schools fail at preparing students to use English properly, and that most of our teaching institutions fail at preparing teachers to use English properly. Many students probably cannot understand enough English to follow science and maths lessons given in English, most teachers probably don't have good enough English to give those lessons. teachers with poor English often teaching pupils with poor English Letting schools decide for themselves will ultimately be the best compromise. We cannot ignore the 80% of the country which can hardly speak English, nor can we ignore the 20% which speak it very well