Taking a leaf from his boss’s book, Deputy Education Minister P Kamalanathan is now the latest minister to extol the virtues of our education system, this time by claiming that our command of English is the best in Asia.
Quoting the English Proficiency Index by Sweden-based EF Education First, Kamalanathan also stressed that we outranked even Singapore.
Questionable source
While our government may be desperate to highlight any positive results, they should not resort to using unscientific and questionable studies to convince themselves.
According to the deputy minister, EF Education First is a research website that focuses on the usage of English in the business community among 65 countries in which English is not a native language. However, what Kamalanathan failed to mention was that the so-called study drew its conclusions from data collected via English tests available for free over the internet.
In other words, participants are self-selected and therefore are not representative of each country’s population. In contrast, proper survey methodology requires unbiased sampling that selects a subset of individuals from within a statistical population according to estimate characteristics of the whole population.
In the case of EF Education First’s English Proficiency Index, the sample is neither representative nor randomly selected. Instead, participants voluntarily choose to take part, hence greatly increasing the margin of error and the probability of an unrepresentative sample. Such a survey cannot be considered scientific or a statistically valid evaluation.
Facts contradict the deputy minister
In truth, it does not take a genius to realise the fallacy of a study that purports our level of English proficiency to be the best in Asia. This is because such a hypothesis goes against all evidence, anecdotal and otherwise.
Last year, the Wall Street Journal highlighted the poor English skills amongst our graduates by quoting a 2011 study by the Malaysian Employers Federation, which found that 60 per cent of companies surveyed stated that the main reason applicants failed their interviews was due to their low command of English.[1]
The same article goes on to cite the results of the Malaysian University English Test (MUET) for March and July last year, which saw only two out of around 100,000 candidates scoring band 6 or “very good.” While 10,000 candidates scored “good” (band 5) or “competent” (band 4), the other 90,000 candidates received bands ranging from 1 to 3, representing “modest,” “limited” and “extremely limited.”
If 90 per cent of our pre-university students cannot score better than “modest” in their MUET, how is it even possible that our command of English could be said to be the best in Asia?
If our English is so good, why spend so much to fix it?
The irony of it all is that the government is very well aware of the deteriorating standard of English in our country. It is for this very reason that the ministry has embarked on a series of costly initiatives to improve the teaching of English, such as the Upholding Bahasa Malaysia and Strengthening English (MBMMBI) programme, the Native English-speaking Mentor Programme (PPJBI or Program Penutur Jati Bahasa Inggeris) and the English Language Proficiency Teaching (ProELT) programme. All these programmes have cost the government more than a billion ringgit over the last five years.
Take, for example, the PPJBI, which saw the Ministry spending RM270 million to hire 360 foreign native English speakers as mentors to train our local primary school English teachers. Despite questionable results after three years of implementation, such as poorer performance in the UPSR English paper, this programme was renewed at a cost of RM184.4 million for two years from 1 October 2013 to 30 September 2015.
Meanwhile, the Ministry spends more than RM200 million annually on MBMMBI since it was launched in 2010. This amounts to more than RM1 billion over the last five years.
If our level of English is indeed the “best in Asia,” then why do all the facts, including the government’s own actions, say otherwise? Instead of making empty boasts based on questionable sources, our education ministers should concentrate on improving our quality of education.