A screenshot of one of the examples cited by DAP lawmaker Dr Ong Kian Ming of Malaysia’s substandard levels of English. – PMO website screenshot, March 30, 2015.A
DAP lawmaker today questioned the deputy education minister's claim that Malaysia's standard of English is better than Singapore's when grammatical errors can be found even in the Prime Minister's Office's official website.
Serdang MP Dr Ong Kian Ming (pic, right) said the minister, P. Kamalanathan, should focus on the task at hand which was to improve the standard of English among English teachers, and stop making inaccurate comparisons.
"I was shocked when I read the news two days ago where our deputy minister of education was reported to have said that the standard of English in Malaysia was higher than Singapore's by referring to a report compiled by a Swedish-based company, EF Education First," he said.
Questioning the comparison, he highlighted a few examples to which he said Kamalanathan should pay attention, beginning with a photo caption in the PMO website's Photo Gallery.
The caption describing Datuk Seri Najib Razak and his wife Datin Seri Rosmah Mansor paying their respects to the late Lee Kuan Yew at the Singapore Parliament read:
“Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak and his wife, Datin Seri Rosmah Mansor present to pay their last respects to the late first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, who had died in Parliament today. Also seen the Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Hsien Loong (right). Funeral service will be held at 2pm, Sunday, at the University Cultural Center, National University of Singapore, followed by cremation a Mandal Crematorium closed.”
Ong said that was the original text on the site, which was edited after numerous complaints from netizens, after which some errors still remained.
He also highlighted another example of bad grammar on a banner at an MCA event attended by MCA president Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai.
The banner read: "For our secular democratic constitution, we strong defends.”
"I leave it to the deputy education minister to identify the grammatical error," Ong said.
He also cited the infamous "chicken chop" diagnosis that went viral in social media earlier this month in which a doctor had diagnosed his child patient with “chicken chop”.
"The doctor in question probably was diagnosing the child as having chicken pox but I cannot say for sure. The child may have accidentally swallowed an entire chicken chop and had to be sent home as a result," Ong said.
Ong said he did not believe these examples were isolated cases.
"If we cannot expect these three groups of people to have a decent standard of English, what more the larger population in Malaysia?
"I would advise the deputy education minister to focus on the task at hand which is to improve the standard of English among our English teachers, to slowly increase the level of difficulty of our English exams, and to stop making inaccurate comparisons in order to give a false impression of the problem," Ong said.
On Saturday, Kamalanathan told a students’ conference in Kuala Lumpur that Malaysians’ English was better than Singaporeans’, and that the country ranked number one in Asia, according to the English Proficiency Index by Sweden-based EF Education First.
"We are number one and you will be happy to know that behind us is Singapore. And this is not what I said. I've given you the reference point. They (EF Education First) give you a good explanation on how this research is done and where we are," he was quoted as saying.
Kamalanathan reportedly said EF Education First was a research website focused on the use of English in the business community among 65 countries in which English was not a native language.
"When we are doing well, we don't talk about it, but when we do something bad, everyone talks about it," he reportedly said at the conference titled “Moderation: youth empowerment and education towards Vision 2020” by What Youth Should Know.
Yesterday, Bukit Bendera MP Zairil Khir Johari said the survey Kamalanathan cited had drawn its results from a sample that was not representative of the population.
“While our government may be desperate to highlight any positive results, they should not resort to using unscientific and questionable studies to convince themselves,” said Zairil in a statement.
He said participants voluntarily chose to take part in the survey, hence greatly increasing the margin of error and the probability of an unrepresentative sample, and that such a survey could not be considered scientific or a statistically valid evaluation.
He said a proper survey methodology required unbiased sampling that selected a subset of individuals from within a statistical population, according to estimate characteristics of the whole population.
But EF Education First had derived its conclusions from data collected via English tests available for free over the Internet in which anyone could take part, said the DAP assistant publicity chief.
- TMI
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