Off the Cuff - We need more English teachers

AMONG the ministries in any country, the one that faces the greatest challenge is the education ministry.
Even in First World nations like the United States and Britain, and nearer home in Singapore, this is also the case.
And rightfully so, because it is in schools and universities that you find the greatest concentration of the population.
In Malaysia, the biggest chunk of the national budget allocation has always gone to education and over one quarter of civil servants are teachers.
We have 10,000 schools and 20 public universities and if you add the countless number of public colleges and universities, it's an awesome critical mass. So much so that it's necessary to have two ministries for education, one for schools and one more for higher education.
In a recent interview, Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh promised Malaysians "to deliver the best education that we can".
Producing human capital that can compete with or be on par with countries that are already in the upper echelon of the world educational standards is certainly the goal of many a nation.
It should be for Malaysia particularly where no efforts and expenses have been spared to deliver what Idris and his predecessors have promised.
When we talk about education, the most relevant aspect of it must be not just any type of education, but quality education. Period.
Nothing short of this is acceptable. Just as in the corporate sector, the bottom-line is return on investment (ROI) and likewise in education, the question to be asked always is: Is the ROI commensurate with the absolutely massive capital outlay all these years?
If not, then everything should be done to fix the delivery system.
It's a no brainer to argue that the teaching of English is still a huge dampener in delivering quality education to achieve the growing challenge of producing the kind of human capital we need to propel Malaysia and Malaysians to the forefront in the league of nations.
To begin with in sheer numbers, we are facing an acute shortage of English teachers and even among such teachers in the system, only slightly more than half are considered proficient to teach the subject.
According to the Education Ministry's English Language Teaching Centre director, Mohamed Abu Bakar, only about 52% of the 40,000 English teachers have achieved the benchmark Common European Framework Reference (CEFR).
With 10,000 schools and 40,000 English teachers, it means that on average, there are only four such teachers to a school.
The remaining 48% are at the level where they can only read, write and understand English well enough to function and communicate. In other words, enough to get along.
One just cannot imagine the workload of our English teachers, let alone in meeting the insatiable thirst among many students to at least have a decent command of the language that's so crucial for their future either in furthering their studies or trying their luck in the job market.
Education Minister Datuk Seri Mahdzir Khalid has spoken about the ministry's roadmap to continue enhancing English proficiency among teachers and students.
There are two grades the teachers need to be at to teach English based on CEFR and the roadmap is part of the implementation of the 2015-2025 Education Blueprint to reform English language education in the country.
The goal of the roadmap is to have all such teachers achieve a level of fluency in the language that matches that of native speakers by 2020.
The crux of the matter is that if one is to be proficient in any language, one has to speak the language as often as possible after learning its basic "rules" or in the case of English its grammar, among other things.
How much space or time is allocated in schools for students to speak the language? Are they really communicating in the language among themselves and their teachers as was the norm for people of my generation and earlier?
As it is, English is hardly spoken in schools and one way to get around the "proficiency crisis" is to allow freer flow of communication in the language. There's no two ways about it.
Just because one or two of our student debaters emerged as champions at the Cambridge Interversity Debating Competition last year and recently in a similar contest in Perth, doesn't mean that we have climbed up the ranking in student proficiency in this crucial language.
Reason being, the vast majority are still languishing in silence and even blaming their plight on the system.
Students' proficiency in English has only improved at a snail's pace after all these years, to about 27.8%.
I take the liberty here to suggest the creation of training colleges solely geared to produce English language teachers.
The teaching staff can either be native speakers or the still large number of retired English teachers who are still physically able to teach.
Such specialised training colleges are financially viable because even other countries acutely short of English teachers would send their trainees here.
I sit on the executive council of the English Speaking Union of Malaysia, a local branch of the international NGO, and have met many ex-teachers who are only too willing to chip in if given the opportunity to help stop the erosion in standards among the present generation.
If those proficient in English are disinterested in becoming teachers because of unattractive pay, then it makes sense for the government to place them in higher grades because they can be considered a special breed in demand everywhere.
Again, purely for the sake of quality education.
In this regard, there's a lot that we can learn from the Singapore model whose education standards are among the world's best. Why not?
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