Languages in the Malaysian Education System: Monolingual Strands in Multilingual Settings

Abstract

Malaysia is ethnolinguistically diverse.According to Ethnologue, for a population of over 30 million, 134 languages are spoken within its territory, of which 112 are indigenous and 22 non-indigenous.Against this backdrop of ethnolinguistic vitality, only some of these languages figure in the formal education system either as the medium of instruction (as in the case of Malay and, for some time, English) or as a subject within the school curriculum (as in the case of Iban, Kadazandusn, Tamil, Chinese and Arabic).This edited volume, which is published under the Routledge Critical Studies in Asian Education series, provides an overview of the "positioning of these languages" within the education system, "for the purpose of integration of the Malaysian peoples" (p.1).In this regard, the "positioning" of languages within the education system is ostensibly political in nature, and is tied closely to Malaysia's postcolonial responses to the project of nation-building, of developing national unity with a population that is linguistically and also culturally and socially diverse.The book is organized in 10 chapters, each authored or co-authored by key researchers in the area.Chapter 1 of the book, entitled 'Positioning languages in the Malaysian education system' sets out to frame the central arguments of the book.It maps out the linguistic landscape of the country and describes the historical and linguistic forces that contributed to the positioning of the Malay language as the national language.The chapter provides an overview of the different school systems in Malaysia, each with its own medium of instruction, namely Malay medium national schools and vernacular schools in which Chinese and Tamil are media of instruction, which were established in colonial Malaya in light of the migration of Chinese and Tamils into the mining and plantation sectors.The chapter also highlights the shifts in status of English medium schools, established in the colonial period but which were discontinued beginning in the 1970s.The positon of English as a "strong second language' within the school system and programmes to address this are also discussed here and taken up further in chapter 3.Chapter 2 picks up on the case for the choice of Malay as the national language and highlights key issues in the implementation of the National Language Policy.In arguing for the case of Malay as national language, the chapter offers an historical overview of the shift involved when Malay vernacular schools in the colonial period became National schools in the post-independence era.This shift, in principle at least, indicated a shift from an ethnic focus to a national focus, where Malay served as the lingua franca for the multilingual, multiethnic polity.Even as Malay replaced English as the medium of instruction at university level, the chapter draws attention to the rise of Malay-English bilingualism not just in tertiary level education, but throughout the school system under the MBMMBI slogan.MBMMBI was an acronym for "To uphold Malay and strengthen English," indicative of the contemporary postcolonial relationship between the languages.Chapter 3 examines the three levels which drive English usage in Malaysia: national, regional and global.At the national level the chapter traces the changes in the role of English within the education system over time; some of the policy flip-flops in recent years regarding the role of English as medium of instruction for Mathematics and Science subjects; and some of the challenges the country faces vis-à-vis English proficiency levels of graduates; some 44,000 graduate remain unemployed and their proficiency has been cited as a reason for employability.At the regional level, English has been adopted as the 'working language' within ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.And at a global level, the continuing large numbers of Malaysian students who seek tertiary education in Anglophone countries or the branch campuses of foreign universities in Malaysia as well as the

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