Friday 29 Mar 2024
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GEORGE TOWN: Deputy Education Minister P Kamalanathan (pic) had resorted to using an unscientific and statically invalid survey to claim that Malaysians have the best command of English in Asia, a DAP lawmaker said yesterday.

Bukit Bendera Member of Parliament Zairil Khir Johari said the survey Kamalanathan cited on Saturday, the English Proficiency Index by Sweden-based EF Education First, drew its results from a sample that was not representative of the population.

“While our government may be desperate to highlight any positive results, it should not resort to using unscientific and questionable studies to convince itself,” said Zairil in a statement yetserday.

“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.”

He said a proper survey methodology required unbiased sampling that selected a subset of individuals from within a statistical population, according to estimate characteristics of the whole population.

But EF Education First derived its conclusions from data collected via English tests available for free over the Internet, and anyone could take part in it, said the DAP assistant publicity chief.

On Saturday, Kamalanathan told a students’ conference in Kuala Lumpur that Malaysians’ English was better than Singapore’s, and that the country ranked No 1 in Asia, news portal Malaysiakini reported.

“We are No 1 and you will be happy to know that behind us is Singapore. And this is not what I said. I’ve given you the reference point. They (EF Education First) give you a good explanation on how this research is done and where we are,” he was quoted as saying in the report.

Kamalanathan reportedly said EF Education First was a research website focused on the use of English in the business community among 65 countries in which English was not a native language.

“When we are doing well, we don’t talk about it, but when we do something bad, everyone talks about it,” he was quoted as saying at the conference on “Moderation: youth empowerment and education towards Vision 2020” by What Youth Should Know.

Zairil said yesterday that it did not take a “genius to realise the fallacy of such a study”, given that the hypothesis went against all evidence.

He said last year, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) highlighted the poor English skills among Malaysian graduates by quoting a 2011 study by the Malaysian Employers Federation (MEF), which found that 60% of firms surveyed said an applicant’s low command of English was the main reason he failed the interview.

He said The WSJ further cited 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 six or “very good”.

While 10,000 candidates scored “good” (band five) or “competent” (band four), the other 90,000 candidates received bands ranging from one to three, representing “modest”, “limited” and “extremely limited”, said Zairil.

“If 90% 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?”

Zairil said that the government was aware of the deteriorating standard of English in Malaysia, and this was why it had pumped billions of ringgit into programmes to improve the teaching of the language in the past five years.

He said the native English-speaking mentor programme cost the education ministry RM270 million to hire 360 foreign native English speakers as mentors to train local primary school English teachers.

“Despite questionable results after three years of implementation, such as poorer performance in the UPSR (Ujian Pencapaian Sekolah Rendah) English paper, this programme was renewed at a cost of RM184.4 million for two years from Oct 1, 2013 to Sept 30, 2015,” said Zairil.

He added that Putrajaya had spent more than RM200 million annually on upholding Bahasa Malaysia and strengthening the English programme since it was launched in 2010, at a total cost of more than RM1 billion over the last five years. — The Malaysian Insider

 

This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on March 30, 2015.

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