News: A Headmaster's View on the Slide of English Proficiency in East Malaysia

http://www.theborneopost.com/2012/06/08/put-a-halt-to-slide-in-english-proficiency-headmaster/

Put a halt to slide in English proficiency — Headmaster – BorneoPost Online

by Lim How Pim, reporters@theborneopost.com. Posted on June 8, 2012, Friday

Anthony Layan Kayah

KUCHING: A teacher with many years of experience teaching English yesterday conceded that the standard of English now “is not as good as during our time.”
Anthony Layan Kayah, 56, said something had to be done to enhance the standard of English among the young ones.
Having been appointed as the headmaster of SK St Teresa since 2002, he said some children had the habit of mixing up English with Bahasa Malaysia while the others had grown used to the SMS style of communicating in the language.
“We have to constantly correct them, telling them that it is not for exams. We have to teach them to differentiate between exams and SMS.
“In exams, they have to write in full and proper English, but when they send SMSes, it is up to them. As far as exams are concerned, it must be grammatically correct,” he told reporters after receiving the Hyacinth Gaudart English Language Teacher Award during the 21st Malaysian English Language Teaching Association (Melta) international conference here yesterday.
Anthony, who has been teaching English for 30 years, noted that more and more Sarawakians used English in their daily life compared to a decade or so ago.
He said when serving in Simunjan and Serian prior to 2002, he had noticed that some parents did not realise the importance of English. “Back then, we even had a programme ‘SIR’, which is ‘Say It Right’ to encourage children to speak proper and correct English.
“You have to speak to them in English rather than using the translation method, which is no good,” said Anthony, from Kampung Paon Gahat, Serian.

One of the ways, he said, was for a teacher to demonstrate the act of drinking from a cup when teaching children to say ‘I want to drink’.

Saying young learners might not speak English “as good as the Queen’s English”, he was glad to note that at the very least, they were picking up the language.
Personally, Anthony said he preferred English as the teaching medium for Science and Maths. He reasoned that this would help keep Malaysian students on par with others.
“I do not want to blame it on education policy, but we shall adapt to changes and needs.”
On the standard of English of pupils at SK St Teresa, he said: “Based on the UPSR results in the last five years, many of our students got A for English, and the pass rate is 98 per cent and above.”
The school has 18 classes with 749 pupils.

Worksheet: My Honeywell Educators@SpaceCamp 2010 Experience

Dear All,

Its a pleasant surprised to know that a friend of mine, Ms. Yong Fui Yin had used a write-up on my experience at the Honeywell Educators@SpaceCamp 2010 experience as a comprehension and summary text for her SPM (1119) exercises for her Skor A+ Kertas Model 2012 Edition published by Pelangi Publications.

I liked the way that the text had been modified and the questions posed for the students to answer.

Below are the text and questions.

Enjoy!


Rodney Tan Chai Whatt
(Spaceman Teacher)

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News: Dancing for English

How about doing a flash mob dance as a way to learn English and advertise your English language association?

That's what happened at the UPSI teaching university in Tanjung Malim, Perak. Read all about this event below.

Rodney Tan
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Dancing for English

STUDENTS and staff members of Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris in Tanjung Malim, Perak were given a surprise when a group of students from the English Language Association (ELA) performed a flash mob in front of the varsity’s Faculty of Languages and Communication.

The flash mob idea came about from several Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) senior students and was agreed upon by the majority of the association members as a fun way of introducing the association into the varsity society.

“We wish to show students of other programmes that we, the English Language Association, are still active,” said association president Fitri Mokhtar.

ELA members staging a flash mob to introduce their association to other students.

To grab the attention of passers-by, one of the association members performed the Adele song Someone Like You.

As students gathered around the faculty’s entrance, a freeze mob that lasted two minutes was carried out by 24 association members.

The members, who were also TESL students, then rocked to the beat of LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem before swaying their hips to Korean girl group Wonder Girls’ Nobody.

“Our intention of having this flash mob is not just to provide you with entertainment but to introduce and welcome you to our association,” explained the director of the programme Muhammad Hafizuddin Ahmad Shukri to the crowd.

When queried about their opinions on the performance, many who gathered to watch the dances agreed that it was a remarkable effort by the students to further establish the association in an interesting way.

The event was made even more memorable due to the participation of international students from Beijing, China.

Source: http://thestar.com.my/education/story.asp?file=/2012/6/3/education/11372743&sec=education

Issue: To single space or double space after the full-stop or period

Dear All,

The writer of this article dwelt on the issue of whether to single space or double space after the full-stop / period.  He makes a passionate plea that the correct method is to single space.

What do you think? Personally, I would tab a single space because it'll save me one less action and the result in terms of appearance would be minimal.

Rodney Tan
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	Two spaces after a period: Why you should never, ever do it. By Farhad Manjoo | Posted Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011, at 6:20 PM ET | Posted Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011, at 6:20 PM ET Space Invaders Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period. Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong. And yet people who use two spaces are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste. * You'd expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you'd be wrong; every third e-mail I get from readers includes the two-space error. (In editing letters for "Dear Farhad," my occasional tech-advice column, I've removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.) The public relations profession is similarly ignorant; I've received press releases and correspondence from the biggest companies in the world that are riddled with extra spaces. Some of my best friends are irredeemable two spacers, too, and even my wife has been known to use an unnecessary extra space every now and then (though she points out that she does so only when writing to other two-spacers, just to make them happy). What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. It's their certainty that they're right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the "correct" number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone—everyone!—said it was proper to use two spaces. Some people admitted to slipping sometimes and using a single space—but when writing something formal, they were always careful to use two. Others explained they mostly used a single space but felt guilty for violating the two-space "rule." Still others said they used two spaces all the time, and they were thrilled to be so proper. When I pointed out that they were doing it wrong—that, in fact, the correct way to end a sentence is with a period followed by a single, proud, beautiful space—the table balked. "Who says two spaces is wrong?" they wanted to know. Typographers, that's who. The people who study and design the typewritten word decided long ago that we should use one space, not two, between sentences. That convention was not arrived at casually. James Felici, author of the The Complete Manual of Typography, points out that the early history of type is one of inconsistent spacing. Hundreds of years ago some typesetters would end sentences with a double space, others would use a single space, and a few renegades would use three or four spaces. Inconsistency reigned in all facets of written communication; there were few conventions regarding spelling, punctuation, character design, and ways to add emphasis to type. But as typesetting became more widespread, its practitioners began to adopt best practices. Felici writes that typesetters in Europe began to settle on a single space around the early 20th century. America followed soon after. Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It's one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men's shirt buttons on the right and women's on the left. Every major style guide—including the Modern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style—prescribes a single space after a period. (The Publications Manual of the American Psychological Association, used widely in the social sciences, allows for two spaces in draft manuscripts but recommends one space in published work.) Most ordinary people would know the one-space rule, too, if it weren't for a quirk of history. In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology—the manual typewriter—invaded the American workplace. To accommodate that machine's shortcomings, everyone began to type wrong. And even though we no longer use typewriters, we all still type like we do. (Also see the persistence of the dreaded Caps Lock key.) The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type—that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks "loose" and uneven; there's a lot of white space between characters and words, so it's more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here's the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. (Courier is the one major exception.) Because we've all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it. Type professionals can get amusingly—if justifiably—overworked about spaces. "Forget about tolerating differences of opinion: typographically speaking, typing two spaces before the start of a new sentence is absolutely, unequivocally wrong," Ilene Strizver, who runs a typographic consulting firm The Type Studio, once wrote. "When I see two spaces I shake my head and I go, Aye yay yay," she told me. "I talk about 'type crimes' often, and in terms of what you can do wrong, this one deserves life imprisonment. It's a pure sign of amateur typography." "A space signals a pause," says David Jury, the author of About Face: Reviving The Rules of Typography. "If you get a really big pause—a big hole—in the middle of a line, the reader pauses. And you don't want people to pause all the time. You want the text to flow." This readability argument is debatable. Typographers can point to no studies or any other evidence proving that single spaces improve readability. When you press them on it, they tend to cite their aesthetic sensibilities. As Jury says, "It's so bloody ugly." But I actually think aesthetics are the best argument in favor of one space over two. One space is simpler, cleaner, and more visually pleasing (it also requires less work, which isn't nothing). A page of text with two spaces between every sentence looks riddled with holes; a page of text with an ordinary space looks just as it should. Is this arbitrary? Sure it is. But so are a lot of our conventions for writing. It's arbitrary that we write shop instead of shoppe, or phone instead of fone, or that we use ! to emphasize a sentence rather than %. We adopted these standards because practitioners of publishing—writers, editors, typographers, and others—settled on them after decades of experience. Among their rules was that we should use one space after a period instead of two—so that's how we should do it. Besides, the argument in favor of two spaces isn't any less arbitrary. Samantha Jacobs, a reading and journalism teacher at Norwood High School in Norwood, Col., told me that she requires her students to use two spaces after a period instead of one, even though she acknowledges that style manuals no longer favor that approach. Why? Because that's what she's used to. "Primarily, I base the spacing on the way I learned," she wrote me in an e-mail glutted with extra spaces. Several other teachers gave me the same explanation for pushing two spaces on their students. But if you think about, that's a pretty backward approach: The only reason today's teachers learned to use two spaces is because their teachers were in the grip of old-school technology. We would never accept teachers pushing other outmoded ideas on kids because that's what was popular back when they were in school. The same should go for typing. So, kids, if your teachers force you to use two spaces, send them a link to this article. Use this as your subject line: "If you type two spaces after a period, you're doing it wrong." Correction, Jan. 18, 2011: This article originally asserted that—in a series of e-mails described as "overwrought, self-important, and dorky"—WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange used two spaces after every period. Assange actually used a monospace font, which made the text of his e-mails appear loose and uneven. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.single.html

News: Professor Dispels Myths Around Teaching English (TEFL)

Professor dispels myths around teaching English

Using several methods simultaneously can be counterproductive for students learning it as a foreign language, research shows

• By Iman Sherif, Staff Reporter
• Published: 00:00 February 5, 2012

Image Credit: Courtesy: Zayed University

Dr Jase Mousa Inaty, assistant professor of Educational Psychology at Zayed University (ZU), has been studying the challenges of teaching English as a second languge to native Arabic speakers. She recently wrote a book ‘The Impact of Spoken English on Learning English as a Foreign Language’.

Globalisation and the need to interact with various cultures means people have to learn how to communicate in different languages these days.

However, becoming proficient in a second language is a challenge that requires commitment and a lot of practice and not everyone learns at the same speed and through the same process.

Dr Jase Mousa Inaty, Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology at Zayed University (ZU), has been studying this problem here in the UAE. Her recent study was focused on native speakers of Arabic, mainly ZU students, who were in the process of learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL).

Her research has led to the publishing of a book titled The Impact of Spoken English on Learning English as a Foreign Language.

Dr Inaty found that learning was not the same for everyone in the study. Some were better learners than others and some learned one skill better than another. The level of proficiency was dependent on the person's ability to comprehend, retain and use information.

"Teaching methods vary but, in general, we learn using one or a combination of these major skills: listening, speaking, writing and reading."

However, using more than one mode can be detrimental to learning, says Dr Inaty. According to her research, the human brain is limited in its capacity to process information, and learners, whether Emirati or otherwise, have the same human cognitive architecture with a limited working memory and an unlimited long-term memory.

"The human cognitive architecture indicates a working memory that is limited in both capacity and duration. When EFL materials are presented in ways that exceed working memory capacity, the learning may be hindered. These hindrances may come from a split-attention effect or even more so a redundancy effect, which was the case in my research."

An area of her studies focused on students' learning ability when teaching listening skills using a traditional method of presenting written material simultaneously with auditory material.

"The thinking is that our students would benefit more since they are both listening and reading the materials at the same time. My research has shown that at least under some circumstances, students will learn best when only one mode of learning [eg reading only] is presented," she said.

Her research shows that teachers should recognise pupils' abilities and cautions them not to overload their students with material.

"The condition is that when a vast amount of material or information is being presented simultaneously, it should not contain identical information. Otherwise, the learner is wasting his/her working memory space on two things that contain identical information — which in turn may not enhance comprehension," she said.

‘Cognitive underload'

"Her studies of Emirati students show that the majority of learners are not using most of that working memory space that is available to them. She calls it "cognitive underload".

A possible cause is that students are not being provided with material rich enough to maintain their interest in learning.

"We need to provide stimulating and rich learning experiences for our human cognitive architecture to reach its potential and flourish. Teachers can do this by selecting and designing materials that are motivating, interesting and relevant to students," she concluded.

Source: http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/uae/education/professor-dispels-myths-around-teaching-english-1.975882

Views: Why Are SMart People Usually Ugly?

	By Daniel Engber | Posted Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2012, at 6:52 PM ET Slate.com Why Are Smart People Usually Ugly? An answer to the Explainer's 2011 Question of the Year. Jean-Paul Sartre and Socrates were known for their brains and not their looks—at least not the good kind. Illlustration by Charlie Powell. It's been a few weeks since we posted the questions that the Explainer was either unwilling or unable to answer in 2011. Among this year's batch of imponderables were inquiries like, Are the blind sleepy all the time? and Does anyone ever get a sex change back? We asked our readers to pick the question that most deserved an answer in the Explainer column. Some 10,000 of you were able to register a vote, and the winning question is presented below. But first, the runners-up: In third place, with 6.6 percent of the total votes, a bit of speculative evolutionary biology: Let's say that a meteor never hits the earth, and dinosaurs continue evolving over all the years human beings have grown into what we are today. What would they be like? In second place, with 7.5 percent, an inquiry into pharmacokinetics: Why does it take 45 minutes for the pharmacy to get your prescription ready—even when no one else is waiting? And in first place, with the support of 9.4 percent of our readers, the winner by a landslide and Explainer Question of the Year for 2011: Why are smart people usually ugly? I get this isn't always the case, but there does seem to be a correlation. Attractiveness doesn't predict intelligence (not all ugly people are smart), but it seems like intelligence can be a good predictor for attractiveness (smart people are usually on the ugly side). Keep in mind, I have nothing against people who are really brilliant, I've just always wondered. The answer: They’re not. Oh, how the Explainer loves a false premise. When it comes time to assemble the year-end list, he'll always give extra credit to questions that are predicated on blatant untruths. In 2010, for example, someone wanted to know why athletes never sneeze. In 2009, a reader asked, Why is it always funny to put something on your head as a pretend hat? But this year's winning question isn't merely ill-posed; it gets the truth exactly backward. The idea that an ugly face might hide a subtle mind has attracted scientific inquiries for many years. At first, scientists wanted to know whether it was possible to read someone's intelligence from the shape of his face. In 1918, a researcher in Ohio showed a dozen photographic portraits of well-dressed children to a group of physicians and teachers, and asked the adults to rank the kids from smartest to dumbest. A couple of years later, a Pittsburgh psychologist ran a similar experiment using headshots of 69 employees from a department store. In both studies, seemingly naive guesses were compared to actual test scores to see if they were ever accurate.* Many such studies followed, and with consistent results: You can learn something about how smart someone is just by looking at a picture. But scientists couldn't figure out where that information might have been hiding in the photographs. The Ohio researcher said that some of his subjects were "greatly influenced by the pleasant appearance or smile, but for some the smile denotes intelligence and for others it denotes feeble-mindedness." The author of the follow-up in Pittsburgh wondered if the secret of intelligence might not be lurking in "the lustre of the eye." While some researchers pondered this question, a Columbia University psychologist named Edward Thorndike made another, related discovery. In 1920, Thorndike published his theory of the "halo effect," according to which subjects, when asked to describe someone's various qualities, tend to "[suffuse] ratings of special features with a halo belonging to the individual as a whole." If they were describing the person's physique, for example, along with his bearing, intelligence, and tact, they would assign high or low ratings across the board. Later studies confirmed that the halo effect could arise from a simple photograph: If someone looks handsome, people tend to assume that he's smarter, more sociable, and better-adjusted, too. Now there were two findings: First, scientists knew that it was possible to gauge someone's intelligence just by sizing him up; second, they knew that people tend to assume that beauty and brains go together. So they asked the next question: Could it be that good-looking people really are more intelligent? Here the data were less clear, but several reviews of the literature have concluded that there is indeed a small, positive relationship between beauty and brains. Most recently, the evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa pulled huge datasets from two sources—the National Child Development Study in the United Kingdom (including 17,000 people born in 1958), and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in the United States (including 21,000 people born around 1980)—both of which included ratings of physical attractiveness and scores on standard intelligence tests. When Kanazawa analyzed the numbers, he found the two were related: In the U.K., for example, attractive children have an additional 12.4 points of IQ, on average. The relationship held even when he controlled for family background, race, and body size. From this, Kanazawa concluded that the famous halo effect is not a cognitive illusion, as so many academics had assumed, but rather an accurate reading of the world: We assume that beautiful people are smart, he argues, because they are. The story does have some caveats and complications. First, a few other studies have come up with different results. A recent look at yearbook photos from a Wisconsin high school in 1957 found no link between IQ and attractiveness among the boys, but a positive correlation for the girls. Another researcher, Leslie Zebrowitz of Brandeis University, noticed that the looks-smarts relationship applies only to the ugly side of the spectrum. It's not that beautiful people are especially smart, she says, so much as that ugly people are especially dumb. Then there's the fact of Kanazawa's having gotten into trouble last spring for asserting—using the same dataset and similar methods to those described above—that African-American women are objectively "far less attractive" than whites, Asians, or Native Americans. (He later acknowledged some flaws in his analysis.) So, getting back to the original question, the bulk of the evidence suggests that smart people are not "usually ugly." In fact, the opposite seems to be true: Either smart people are more beautiful than average, or dumb people are more ugly (or both). And while no facial features within the normal range could ever be that useful as a predictor of intelligence, people can perform better than you’d expect from random chance using nothing more than a head shot. All of which leaves one great, unanswered question. If smart people tend to be good-looking, that might explain the halo effect. But what led our questioner to get things backward and assume that smart people were ugly? And why are there so many like-minded others, asking the same question—or its inverse—around the Internet? (Here's one, and one more.) Aren't we all familiar with the archetypical nerd, who is both ugly and smart? At the opposite end, what about all those beautiful, airheaded women and beefy, brainless men we see on television? Could the person who wrote in with the 2011 Question of the Year be succumbing to a bias that hasn't yet been documented in the lab—a sort of halo effect in reverse, a "horns effect," perhaps? French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, 1957 STF/AFP/Getty Images. Ugly geniuses aren't uncommon in history, of course, and while these anecdotes tell us nothing about the population as a whole, the memory of people who were famously hideous and brilliant might have an outsize influence on our judgments. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, was short, bespectacled, and wall-eyed. ("I cannot even decide whether [my face] is handsome or ugly," says one of his characters in Nausea. "I think it is ugly because I have been told so.") Ancient sources tell us that the great philosopher Socrates had thinning hair, flared nostrils, widely-spaced eyes, a thick neck, slobby shoulders, and a pot belly. Ludwig van Beethoven was ugly and smelled bad; Abraham Lincoln's face struck the poet Walt Whitman as being "so awful ugly it becomes beautiful." In addition, Kanazawa points out that a closer look at the data reveals an interesting fact: The very ugliest people in his dataset are dumber on average, but they also tend to be the most diverse when it comes to intelligence. That means that if you're at the low end of the spectrum for looks, you're more likely than anyone else to be at one extreme end for IQ (either very dumb or very smart). If that's the case, then it might provide another reason why Sartre and Socrates types stick out in our minds. We know (consciously or not) that ugly people tend to be a little dim; but at the same time, there are more brilliant brutes running around than we might expect. For his part, Kanazawa rejects the notion of the horns effect—he doesn't believe the smart-and-ugly stereotype exists at all. (Indeed, it has never been shown in the lab.) Instead, he says, we may be assuming that smart people are nerdy, and that nerdy people tend to lack social skills. Since people with social skills are attractive, there could be an indirect link between at least one kind of "attractiveness" and intelligence. But if you're looking at pure "beauty," as measured by rating photographs or measured facial features, then intelligence and looks go hand-in-hand. Bonus Explainer: Why might intelligence and looks go hand-in-hand? There are a few different theories. First, it might be that some common genetic factor produces both smarts and beauty. Or maybe there's a combination of genes that make people both dumb and ugly. Kanazawa thinks it's the former, arguing that intelligent men have tended to rise to the top of the social hierarchy and select beautiful women as their mates. Their offspring, contra George Bernard Shaw's supposed quip, would have had both traits together. Another theory holds that certain environmental factors in the womb or just after birth can produce both facial disfigurements and cognitive impairments on one side, or facial symmetry and high intelligence on the other. A third suggests that attractive children are treated better, and receive more attention from their caretakers and teachers, which helps to nurture a sharper mind. It's also possible that smart people are better able to take care of themselves and their looks. Explainer thanks Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics, Joshua Knobe of Yale University, Alina Simone, author of You Must Go and Win, and Leslie Zebrowitz of Brandeis University. * * * Good news: After years of hiding out in the Explainatorium like a banished superhero, answering submitted questions from deep inside the fortress, the Explainer has decided to soar out into the world, pen in hand, to spread peace and understanding among the column's faithful. And so we present a new, occasional feature on Slate: the Explainer House Call. Do you have a family disagreement over some fact or pseudo-fact? Are you stuck in an endless argument with an annoying co-worker or a friend? Have your attempts to Google your way out of it only pushed you both into the filter bubbles of the Internet? Worry no more: The Explainer will be your arbiter and your savior, an avenging angel of argument, slinging thunderbolts of pure reason and drenching your squabbles in the heavy rain of explanation. How does one qualify for this personal Explainer service? To get a house call, and have the Explainer resolve your special beef in Slate, you must first gain the support of your peers. What factual matter has been driving you and your friend/spouse/coworker bonkers in recent weeks? Post a short summary on or with the hashtag #ExplainerHouseCall. Then we'll ask the members of Explainer Nation to vote for the dispute that's most deserving of the Explainer's attention.      (Winners: Please note that the Explainer will not actually visit your house.) Correction, Jan. 12, 2012: The original overstated the magnitude of the results of the Ohio and Pittsburgh studies.

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/explainer/2012/01/are_smart_people_ugly_the_explainer_s_2011_question_of_the_year_.html

MUET 2011 - Views & Reply

There was an interesting letter to the Editor of The STAR concerning what was perceived as changes in the frequency and the raised fees for the MUET exams & the deterioriating standard of marking.

Here's the letter below and the accompanying reply by the MOE of Malaysia for your information.

Rodney Tan

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Sunday December 18, 2011

Don’t make a mockery of MUET

AS A newly-retired English language teacher who has taught MUET ( Malaysia University English Test) classes for more than a decade, I have always subscribed to the view that decisions taken about educational matters should always be guided by the best interests of the students and not sacrificed on the altar of financial gains.

Thus when I recently learnt that the test would be conducted three times next year — March, July and November — and the registration fee raised from RM60 to RM100, I am compelled to offer my views on many of the issues affecting the MUET classes.

To begin with, logic will dictate that many school candidates will now choose to sit for the test in March to secure a good Band score as fast as possible (which is what many Lower Six students are going to do ), failing which they can then choose to sit for the exam in July and November to secure higher scores and in the process, swell the coffers of the Malaysian Examinations Council (MEC).

And that is what administering the MUET three times a year will bring about — making a mockery of the whole purpose of introducing MUET in the first place.

So now, instead of the recommended 80 hours of MUET sessions, many schools will have to make do with less than 35 hours. Leaving aside the question on whether such a move is practical or wise the issue should be: What good will such a plan bring about when students are allowed to sit for their MUET exam so soon? Clearly, a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

Unhappy situation

As matters now stand, the students are being given the option to sit for the MUET in May instead of November creating an unhappy situation whereby after the test, MUET teachers have a hard time getting students to stay engaged in their MUET lessons. In previous years, to keep my English classes going after the MUET in May, I would teach my students Phonetics and Business Communication, among other things. However there were students who upon receiving their MUET results in July, were not keen to follow the MUET lessons, especially if they had secured Bands 5 and 4. This in effect meant that I only had to teach the group of students who registered to resit their MUET exam in November. With Lower Six students now allowed to sit for their MUET exam in March, students would be left to their own devices once the exams are over.

They would most likely use their MUET periods to revise their other STPM subjects.

And such unfortunate circumstances have conspired to make MUET teachers the butt of jokes and resentment in schools for allegedly getting paid for having such a “good” time in school, no thanks to the flexible MUET dates.

Having taught MUET classes for so many years, I must say the standards of marking and grading MUET papers have somewhat become inconsistent over the years.

In the early years of MUET, only two or three students would manage to secure a Band 5. Then, after some years, just like the grade inflation plaguing SPM subjects, almost half the students in the better MUET classes were able to secure Band 5. In fact, even average students were able to obtain a Band 4! And it is surprising to find that students who fared so poorly in their written English have still managed to secure a low Band 5 for the test.

The fact is that when students are able to work out most of the answers for the Reading Comprehension paper which carries 45% of the overall aggregate scores (under the old test specifications) and do moderately well in the speaking and listening components, which together carry 30% of the aggregate scores, it is still possible for them to secure a low Band 5 even if they barely pass the writing component which constitutes 25 % of the aggregate scores.

Thus, when MUET is not perceived as a reliable measure of the candidates’ English language proficiency, it has become largely optional, if considered at all, in applying for admission in local private colleges with “twinning” courses with their overseas counterparts which allocate little importance to it.

When students head to Singapore for their tertiary education, they are made to sit for the English Qualifying Test, even if they have secured a high Band 5 in MUET. This is not surprising as many applicants can’t even write a few sentences without grammatical errors!

It is a sad reflection of how the standard of English has deteriorated in schools these days.

Poor standards

Below is an example of an an opinion written by a student on whether modern advertising is a bad influence on today’s youth.

“… nowadays, when we swift on the televisyens, most of the time is for advertised the advertisement. When they watching the TV programme, the children are also watching together by them. ….Some of the business people are using a women body to advertised their product …”

Let me also point out that fine tuning the writing component by replacing Question 1, which was formerly a summary question with a question on the interpretation of data will not do any good as MUET teachers do no have the luxury of time to put their charges through an intensive course to polish up the latter’s grammar and vocabulary skills. To persist with the current writing paper is akin to putting the cart before the horse.

It would also be wise if the MEC takes note that since Question 1 in the writing component now involves statistics, some calculations and analysis of data, maintaining the 1½ hours for the paper is hardly sufficient.

Candidates will face severe time constraints in tackling the writing paper and only with constant practice can they hope to do well in the paper. Upper Six students will be hard-pressed to do well if they are allowed to take their MUET exams so early in March. The selection of examiners for MUET’s speaking component is another issue that needs to be urgently addressed. It is puzzling why so many competent MUET teachers are sidelined when it comes to appointing examiners for this component while those not at all involved in teaching MUET classes are selected.

Let me cite an example of a team leader who was not a MUET teacher overruling his junior co-examiner who was a MUET teacher, by assessing a candidate who spoke excellent English and performed impressively for both the individual presentation and group discussion task a Band 4, when it was obvious that the candidate was clearly of Band 5 or Band 6 calibre. The rationale? The team leader, dogmatically claimed that they should avoid giving candidates a high band score for speaking as far as possible, as instructed by their superiors!

This undesirable state of affairs is played out in some STPM subjects as well. It brings to mind what a Maths teacher involved in marking STPM exam scripts said about one of his co-markers who was a Chemistry graduate, and not a bona fide Maths teacher.

The latter had refused to accept a candidate’s Maths answer because the candidate had used another approach. The examiner, who was apparently more at home with Chemistry, chose to blindly follow what was in the marking scheme and penalised the poor student for securing the answer using a formula that differed from the one in the marking scheme!

Such instances are reasons why it is crucial to ensure that only competent and experienced examiners who are teaching the respective subjects be given the task of marking public exam papers which determine the academic future and career prospects of the candidates.

Anything short of that will not only affect the credibility of the marked papers, but also victimise some candidates through no fault of their own.

The rationale given for the introduction of MUET in 1999 was that undergraduates in local universities were wasting their time learning basic grammar, and therefore MUET was introduced to address the low English proficiency of students before pursuing higher education.

If that is the case, the present MUET general test specifications and MUET format do not address the poor grammar and vocabulary skills of many of the candidates. And things won’t get better with the early registration for the test when candidates simply do not have sufficient and sustained MUET lessons to improve their low language proficiency in English.

Grammar skills

There is a dire need to test grammar to ensure candidates take pains to improve their grammar and vocabulary skills and be aware of the common failings displayed in their written English. Grammar is an integral part of effective academic writing.

Thus, developing a better understanding of how individual words and groups of words work to form coherent sentences and paragraphs to construct academic texts will be useful. With knowledge born out of hard classroom experience, it is my contention that instead of the MUET general test specifications and exam, Form Six students are better off if they are given a well-crafted English course conducted by committed teachers to prepare them for entry to tertiary education. They can then be made to sit for a rigorous common English entrance examination for admission into public universities.

It is about time the MEC carried out a survey to find out if the present coursework and MUET serves to achieve the original aims. The council should not be too concerned with raising fees to swell its coffers. The MUET exam must surely be a means towards an end and, not an end by itself.

HENRY SOON

Via e-mail

RESPONSE TO NEWSPAPER REPORT

Ministry of Education (MOE) would like to refer to an article by Henry Soon published in Sunday Star dated 18 December 2011 on the issue of – Don’t make a mockery of MUET.

The Malaysian University English Test (MUET) is an English language proficiency test designed to measure the English language ability of students wishing to pursue first degree studies in local institutions of public learning. With MUET, English is taught at Sixth Form or pre-university level to equip students with the appropriate level of proficiency in English to enable them to perform effectively in their academic pursuits at tertiary level.

The Malaysian Examinations Council (MEC) fully agrees with Mr Henry Soon’s opinion that decisions on educational matters should be in the best interests of students. MUET will be conducted three times a year beginning 2012, in March, July and November. This policy is made after receiving numerous requests from students who intend to take MUET and after an in-depth study of its implications.

At present, candidates who take the Mid-Year MUET face problems in their appeals for intake into institutions of higher learning. The closing date for such appeals is end of June whilst the results for Mid-Year MUET are released in July. With MUET being offered three times a year, candidates who take the March MUET are able to obtain their MUET results prior to the closing date for appeals.

At present too, MUET dates clash with the examination schedules, new student intake and semester holidays of various institutions of higher learning. Hence, providing an additional test will offer better alternatives to students from these institutions to select the MUET session that best suit their needs.

Offering three exams a year too, allow more opportunities for candidates to improve their MUET score. They do not need to wait 6 months before taking the next MUET. This benefits school candidates, private candidates, and also university students who require a stipulated minimum MUET band to qualify for entrance or graduate from university. Private candidates who work in the private or public sector too have a better choice of MUET sessions as some take the MUET for promotional purposes.

Contrary to Mr Soon’s claim, the decision to include an additional MUET session in our yearly schedule was never made for “financial gains”. The additional session in fact will put more demands on MEC’s operational, administrative and financial resources, but having the best interests of our clients in mind, we believe that the benefits to our clients and nation far outweigh the additional costs incurred. In an era where institutions of higher learning are opening up opportunities for flexible entry and exit points for tertiary education, the additional MUET session will provide flexibility and enhance student mobility in line with national and international development.

On the issue of school candidates sitting for MUET in March, students not being keen to stay engaged in MUET lessons after taking the MUET early and MUET teachers being the butt of jokes and resentment due to the flexible MUET dates, this is a school administrative matter. It is stipulated clearly in a circular to schools and also in the MUET Test Specifications (page 9) that “the MUET programme should involve 240 hours of teaching time spanning three school terms. Instruction should be carried out for 8 periods a week at 40 minutes per period.” If schools do not comply with this and students feel they are prepared to take the test earlier, it is beyond the jurisdiction of the MEC. We are, however, confident that school administrators and MUET teachers will have the necessary expertise and creativity to manage the teaching-learning process in their schools. Instead of viewing the additional MUET session as a burden, we believe schools will make full use of the flexibility offered for the benefit of their students.

With regards to the issue of students scoring Band 5, well, like Mr Henry Soon stated, they are students from “the better MUET classes.” With stringent marking and a standardized set of scoring criteria, only the proficient can attain Band 5. So far, and again contrary to Mr Soon’s claim of a “grade inflation”, national records show that only 1% out of 85000 candidates have managed to obtain Band 5.

Students who apply to universities in the United Kingdom, United States or Singapore are required to sit for the IELTS, TOEFL or qualifying tests because that is the entrance requirement of such institutions.

Question 1 of the MUET writing paper has been changed from summary writing to report writing as this skill is more reflective of academic writing in universities, that is writing reports that incorporate the skills of analyzing and synthesizing ideas based on data given. Candidates are not required to carry out any calculations. The example of a piece of writing given on “modern advertising” is not based on any previous MUET question or script.

On the issue of teachers not having enough time to teach grammar and vocabulary and the MUET Test Specifications not addressing the students’ poor grasp of grammar and vocabulary, please refer again to the recommended number of hours of teaching time as stated in the Test Specifications.

MUET teachers are selected to be MUET examiners based on their qualifications in English or TESL. Some MUET teachers do not choose to be examiners, hence to get a larger pool of examiners, MEC has to appoint teachers who teach Forms Four or Five. MUET teachers have done well and are very committed in preparing their students for the MUET and the examiners too have responsibly marked the MUET scripts. Examiners for Speaking and Writing have to sit for a proficiency test and are given training on marking besides attending marking coordination meetings. It should be pointed out that MUET is a criterion-referenced test, i.e. there is a set of established criteria or standard of performance for each band. If a candidate has met the criteria set for a high band, there are no reservations in awarding the candidate the mark or band he or she deserves. As pointed out earlier, the issue of “grade inflation” (or ‘deflation’ in this case) does not arise in MUET – candidates get what they deserve according to a set of established criteria.

MUET fees have to be raised from RM60.00 to RM100.00 due to the rising costs of administering the test. MEC, in fact has been bearing the extra costs incurred which are not covered by the previous fee of RM60.00. MEC carried out a comprehensive study taking into consideration the views of students, teachers, lecturers, examiners, institutions of higher learning and State Education Departments before reviewing and implementing the MUET Test Specifications, administrative procedures and costing.

Finally, we would like to assure Mr Henry Soon and members of the public that as an examination body, MEC has always strived for continual improvement. We adhere to internationally established practices of assessment in ensuring the validity and reliability of MUET which includes among others, training of examiners, close analysis of test performance, benchmarking with and correlational studies against international tests, and constant communications with our stakeholders, including feedback from students, teachers, examiners, universities and experts in the field. Our close monitoring of MUET shows that it is a reliable measure of candidates’ proficiency in English in relation to their readiness for tertiary education.

CORPORATE COMMUNICATION UNIT

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION MALAYSIA

Source: http://bpa.bernama.com/details.php?id=2534b