JOHOR BARU: The Johor Education Department is taking proactive measures to ensure students in the state can be proficient in the English language, especially as a medium of conversation.
According to the department's Principal Assistant Director of English Language, Shanmuganathan Suppiah, the overall English competency among primary and secondary school students in Johor is comparatively well especially in comprehension and writing.
However, Shanmuganathan said it’s a different case for conversational and verbal English speaking tests, where many students fail to get good scores due to lack of verbal practice and failure to understand the correct dictions of each spoken word.
“There are many factors, not only due to poor understanding of the language. It could be due to lack of confidence from the students themselves to converse openly in front of others as they don’t want to be embarrassed when the words uttered sound silly or are wrongly pronounced,” Shanmuganathan said.
Shanmuganathan said that for efforts to boost English as a medium of speech among students in the state, the department will be engaging with schools all over the state to carry out English speaking activities starting this year.
“We are hoping to bring back the heyday of English speakers and debaters where the orators or speakers can voice their opinions in fluent English,” he said.
Shanmuganathan said for the initiative, the department will partially utilise the RM1 million education allocation from this year state budget to fund for the English Enrichment Programme recently launched in Tangkak in collaboration with the department and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and Johor Education Foundation (YPJ).
“The memorandum of understanding signed between the two higher education institutions is to propel English language workshops in schools, facilitated by the two institutions' English subject expertise,” he said.
Shanmuganathan was speaking to reporters after attending the New Straits Times – Newspaper in Education workshop held at the Sultan Ismail public library today.
The half-day workshop was organised by the state education department and the Sultan Ismail public library to empower English teachers in the state to make use of the NST newspaper as a learning tool in classroom lessons.
A total of 60 teachers from primary and secondary schools in the state attended the workshop, which was conducted by English language trainer Vincent D’Silva.
D’Silva said the program has certainly brought improvement in the English teaching environment in schools, as those who participated in the workshop are taught creative ways of using the paper during lessons.
“The NST newspaper is an ideal teaching tool because it is an authentic slice of real life. It can be integrated into the school English syllabus and subsequently improves their command of the language,” said D’Silva.
During the workshop, teachers were exposed to the rich content that can be extracted from the paper, which can be used as a source of information for students to improve.
Narjariah Sahari, 29, from SK Pasir Gudang 1, who has been teaching English at the school for the past five years, said this is the first time she was exposed to using an English medium newspaper in teaching. She admits that the NST newspaper was the best choice for such a purpose.
“It's practical and caters to all aspects of interest and I am certainly using the paper for my next classroom lessons. D’Silva's methods certainly makes teaching the language more fun and easy for the students to grasp the subject better,” she said.