Good for Malaysians to be multilingual

THE move to teach Chinese and Tamil as elective subjects to pupils of national primary schools is indeed welcome news.

There is no doubt that multilingual Malaysians will be an asset to the country in the rapidly globalised world.

But most importantly it is good for national integration, an objective which we must never lose sight of and which we must strive for all the time.

But the idea of Malaysians speaking to each other in several languages, and not just two, is not something new. It has been broached before.

But with the announcement by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi that it is a policy move, there can be no doubt that it is going to be implemented soon after the nuts and bolts of it are worked out.

According to the government, it is one way of making national schools the first choice of Malaysians.

Of course, much more need to be done in this regard to arrest the trend of non-Malay parents choosing other schools as their first preference for their children.

But at least for those parents who want to send their children to national schools, they no longer have to feel guilty about them (their children) not being given the opportunity to learn to read and write in their mother tongues.

And to assure them that the languages are not going to be taught in the way they have been in the much-criticised POL (pupils own language) classes, they are going to be treated as scheduled subjects and included in the daily timetables.

Which means that schools need not have a minimum enrolment of 15 pupils as currently stipulated, before they can offer the subjects.

Under this move, pupils are allowed, if they want to, to choose not to learn their own mother tongue but to take up another language. This should not be discouraged.

The move announced by the prime minister is advantageous to the Malays, too. At the moment, most Malays are proficient in two languages, but speak and write better in Bahasa Malaysia than in English.

With this move a Malay pupil now has an opportunity to learn a third language, which most pupils of the other races already have.

Some may argue that many Malay pupils are learning Arabic in their agama classes. Even so, there is no denying the advantage to a person the ability to speak and write in a third or even a fourth language.

The move will require the recruitment of thousands more language teachers, especially Chinese language teachers.

The Education Ministry is now mulling the possibility of establishing special language institutes to train the teachers.

Unlike in the past whenever a policy move involving education is made, there seems to be only favourable reaction from the public.

This may be due to the prime minister's insistence that the move will in no way affect the position of Bahasa Malaysia as the medium of instruction.

In fact, he also said that the language would be further strengthened to make it even possible to be use as the language of science and technology.

But he also emphasised that the teaching of science and mathematics in English would continue.

The public acquiescence of the move to make Chinese and Tamil to be part of the formal curriculum should persuade the Education Ministry to implement it in stages, making use of whatever resources are available instead of waiting for more teachers to be trained.