Datuk Felician Teo
SIBU: The recent revelation of wrong grammar in school workbooks has put a further spin on the issue of declining English standards in the school system.
“While millions of ringgit are being spent by the Ministry of Education annually to upgrade the standard of English language teaching in schools, basic workbooks are discovered to be inundated with grammatical errors,” lamented educationist Datuk Felician Teo.
“This will clearly set back the government’s agenda of uplifting English standards among students,” he suggested yesterday.
He was commenting on a Bernama article that book publishers should be responsible in ensuring the correct usage of English grammar in Science and Mathematics school workbooks, say education experts.
Academy of Language Studies, Universiti Teknologi Mara Associate Professor Dr Ramesh Nair reportedly said the quality depended on the accuracy of the grammar to avoid confusion among students during their revision, thus affecting performance.
Ramesh was also quoted to have said the use of language was important and if it was used incorrectly, with a lot of errors, might give students a wrong impression of the English language.
Nair made the comment following reports on the alleged errors in English grammar in several Science and Mathematics school workbooks.
The report also quoted a publishing company manager who claimed to have taken a copy of last year’s examination paper released by the Malaysian Examination Syndicate as content for the workbook, without making any changes.
Nair, who is an expert in the English language, said if the allegations were true, the education ministry should take proactive steps to resolve the problem so that the issue of grammatical errors was not prolonged.
To this, Teo said: “Whether the book publishers or writers are to be blamed for this debacle, it is clear that the decline of English has reached such proportions that there is an acute shortage of English writers and editors even at the level of writing and compiling school workbooks.”
He voiced concern that students relying on these workbooks were inadvertently exposed to grammatical errors and if not correctly pointed out, may even assumed them to be correct.
This would cause greater confusion among students who were already weak in the language, he added.
“There is an urgent need to examine the root causes and stop the problem from escalating further.
“If we do not uplift the standard of English among our students, they will lose the edge in competing for jobs and opportunities in the workplace and eventually, the country will also lose its edge as its human capital decreases in value through poor English competency,” Teo said.