PPSMI - why must we learn Science and Mathematics in English

I find it interesting how parents are reacting the Government's decision to repeal PPSMI. Not that I am emotionally supporting either side but I would like to share a rationale view on why it make sense to have teaching and learning of Science and Mathematics subjects in English language (at least for now).  The first question I would like to ask is "do we have a choice of language to effectively and efficiently transfer the knowledge of Science and Mathematics other than in English language?"  Someone might point out that any language can be used to teach and learn these two subjects, and I totally agree. The fact is that these two subjects are being taught and learned in other languages besides English, for example in France, French is used; in Germany, German is used, in Japan and Korea, Japanese and Korean being used respectively. So what is the issue of using BM to teach and learn Science and Mathematics in Malaysia? It is the national language right? And all Malaysian are expected to be proficient and competent in this language. So if BM can be used to teach and learn the two subjects as it is being used to teach and learn other subjects (yes, in some schools English teachers are using BM to teach English!), so what is the PPSMI issue?

Well the question I asked was not only what language to use but what language to use to effectively and efficiently teach and learn Science and Mathematics. Granted that any language, including sign language can be used to teach and learn any subject.  However, for Science and Mathematics, the most effective and efficient language to use in Malaysian context is English. Allow me to explain by inviting you to watch the 1 min clip below (loaded from Youtube - search and you will find)

In conclusion, I would like to suggest that two conditions must be present for an effectively efficient and efficiently effective transfer of knowledge

1. Teacher and Learner share the common language (in the clip it was English rather than Latin, the "original" language for Knowledge)
2. The Knowledge has been effectively captured (originally or translated) in that common language to facilitate teaching and learning. (my Taiwanese classmates referred to textbooks translated into Mandarin while studying Engineering in an American College!).

If you would like to share your perspective on this issue, you are welcome to leave a comment under this posting or visit Pro Mind Resources on facebook for a real-time intellectual discourse.

Confidence vs Competence vs Proficient

Watch and tell me which one do she possessed....Language Proficiency, Language Competence, or Language Confidence?

Better English but lack of confidence.

This was on The Star dated 19 Sept 2011.  Interesting to find that our fresh graduates are showing better grasp of English  but at the same time lack of self-confidence. Something must have gone right with our education system that the level of English Language has improved over the years. Perhaps due to the emphasis (sometimes overemphasis by schools, parents, employers, etc) for students to master the English language. It seems that the message was loud and clear that be proficient in English or loose in the job market.  Unfortunately, language proficiency alone will not guarantee that the student will be candidate of choice to fill up job vacancies.  What we are not "teaching" our students is that competence, among others is also a critical qualities to be successful in securing a job offer.

In my days as HR practitioner, specifically playing the role of a recruiter I was more interested to assess candidate language competence rather than English proficiency. English proficiency can be detected during the job application process in their cover letter or resume. Of probably thousands of applications I received and reviewed, only a handful could be considered having good English proficiency. What would you make out a candidate who wrote "I'm graduated from U_____." or "I was graduated from U_____"?  Given the cut and paste, template-driven culture, this grammatical mistakes often times appeared in applications from candidates of the same University! Enough of this as I do not intend to give an English Language lesson. I'm more interested to talk about language competence.

By "language competence" I mean the ability to use language for communication purposes. Someone with language competence would appear to have better self-confidence when communicating, Or is it the other way around that someone need self-confidence to portray better language competence. Chicken and egg situation? Not really.  I'd seen candidates with high self-confidence portraying low language competence as well as candidates with high language competence displaying low self-confidence.  Language competence do contribute to high self-confidence but at the same time being competence in the subject matter would influence better self-confidence.

So what should be our focus? Should we focus on language proficiency or language competence?  I'd say both.  unfortunately the focus of our schools is on proficiency and not competency. A student with grade-A for English means he/she is proficient in English not necessarily competence in English. Very much the same for other subjects - mathematics, science, geography, history, etc....what our children learn at school is make them more proficient in the subject but not necessarily competence.  To be competence in the subject matter, one must be able to use one proficiency in the subject matter. I conclude that there is a need to develop subject competence. If schools failed or not designed to do it, then another development avenue is required to ensure our children develop their self-confidence by being both proficient and competence.

Communicative challenges of Special Children

This posting is a follow up to my earlier posting titled "AQUA KASEH and Social Competence". Halberstadt, Denham, and Dunsmore in their paper titled Affective Social Competence (in Social Development, 10, 1, 2001, Blackwell Publisher Ltd. 2001) discussed on the need to conduct their research to understand Special Children social competence deficits. I had extracted from their paper the communicative issues faced by the nonnormative populations namely Autism, Behavior Disorder, and Maltreatment. These issues posed communicative challenges to the special children in their social competence development.

Autism

·         Less able to imitate others’ emotions (Hertzig, Snow, & Sherman, 1989)

·         Often facial expressions are incongruent to situation (McGee, Feldman, & Chernin, 1991)

·         Do not attend to social messages (Dawson, Meltzoff, Osterling, Rinaldi, & Brown, 1998; Osterling & Dawson, 1994)

·         Delayed understanding of basic, unequivocal emotional situation (not immediately show excitement); show deficit in comprehension of emotions caused by beliefs (Baron-Cohen, 1991)

·         Spend less time looking at distressed or fearful adults and focus on objects instead (Sigman, Kasari, Kwon, & Yirmiya, 1992)

·         Similar physiological experiences of the emotion event but more ambiguous facial expressions (Steinhilber, Jones, and Dunsmore, 1999)

·         Rarely engage in joint attention (Dawson, et al.,1998; Lewy & Dawson, 1992; Osterling & Dawson, 1994; Steinhilber, et al., 199)

Behavior disorder

• Send emotional messages that are proportionally more negative (American Psychiatric Association, 1987)
• Showed more extreme responses to a negative mood induction (Cole, Zahn-Waxler, Fox, Usher, & Welsh, 1996; Cole, Zahn-Waxler, & Smith, 1994)
• Deficits in ability to receive others’ emotional messages (Casey & Schlosser, 1994; Cook, Greenberg, & Kusche, 1994; Nowicki & Duke, 1994; Russell, Stokes, Jones, Czogalik, & Rohleder, 1993; but see Cole, Usher & Cargo, 1993)
• Spend less time scanning the social environment and, consequently, recall fewer details of emotional stimuli (Casey & Schlosser, 1994)
• More often attribute hostile intentionality to others (Casey & Schlosser, 1994; Dodge & Frame, 1982; Dodge, Murphy, & Buchsbaum, 1984; Dodge & Somberg, 1987)
• Less awareness of their own affective experience, and they clearly have more difficulty identifying and understanding their own feelings (Casey & Schlosser, 1994; Cook et al., 1994)
• Diminished abilities to constructively manage and regulate their emotions, may express emotions impulsively as they are felt (Greenberg, Kusche, & Speltz, 1991)
• Displaying anger at inappropriate times (Cole, et al., 1994);
• May show brittle control or denial of negative emotion (Cole, et al. 1994)
• Less well able to integrate nonverbal skills (Russell et al., 1993)

Maltreatment

·         Less likely to use internal state words; will do so in restricted manner (Beeghly & Cicchetti, 1994)

·         Less able to recognize photographs of child and adult expressions (During & McMahon, 1991)

·         Less able to recognize ‘pure’ and ‘masked’ emotions (Camras, Ribordy, & Hill, 1988; Cassidy et al., 1992)

·         Do not habituate to interadult hostility involving their mothers; they become aroused and aggressive themselves, attempting to help or comfort their mothers, or intervene in the conflict on their mother’s behalf (Cummings, Hennessey, Rabideau, & Cicchetti, 1994)

·         Show deficits on self-reported empathy measures (Straker & Jacobson, 1981)

·         Show more inappropriate responses (such as anger, aggression, or withdrawal to their peers’ distress (Howes & Eldredge, 1985; Klimes-Dougan & Kistner, 1990; Main & George, 1985)

·         Show more despressed/dysthymic and anxious affect (Toth, Manly & Cicchetti, 1992)

·         Show more anger and more situational inappropriate and inflexible emotions (Erickson, Egeland & Pianta, 1989; Shields, Cicchetti & Ryan, 1994)

Safir-Whorf Hypothesis in Interpersonal Communication

Interesting academic video that explains the Safir-Whorf Hypothesis. The Hypothesis explains development of language and the linguistic influence to the way culture are shaped. Also applicable to interpersonal communication especially when dealing with person from a different linguistic culture. Enjoy and would like to hear your comments.

Should English be the default language?

 This was on The Star (20th October 2011) pg 54.

The views of this writer had aroused me to write my perspective of the issue.  In my earlier blog postings, I questioned whether English should be the default language for Commerce and Knowledge (Academic & Intellectual interactions). I proposed that the language of the trading partner that have the upper hand in the trading transaction will be the language of commerce (at least in the transactions involving the two parties). I also proposed that the language of Knowledge is the language use to create, transfer/share and apply the knowledge.

While one can insist on English to be the language of commerce if and when one has an upper hand in trading or both parties agrees to do so, I find it wrong for one to insist on English to be the language of knowledge. To help me with this argument, I invite you to watch this video from TED.com. The speaker talk about how insisting on English will limit knowledge and in fact cause lost of knowledge. Enjoy the video.

Is English the language of knowledge by default?

 This was on The Star (20th October 2011) pg 54.

The views of this writer had aroused me to write my perspective of the issue.  In my earlier blog posting, I shared my views about language of commerce. I proposed that the language of the trading partner that have the upper hand in the trading transaction will be the language of commerce (at least in the transactions involving the two parties).

Before I share my views on language of knowledge (for education and intellectual interactions), i would like to reiterate that I do not support or oppose the views of the above writer. I only felt that additional point of views need to be shared so that you could make an informed conclusion on your own. In fact, I could accept the fact that "a scientist from MIT would never understand a physics research paper and mathematical lemmas written in Malay...." especially if that particular scientist do not know any other language besides English.  MIT is in an English speaking country (USA). However, if you go their library, I bet you will find scholarly literature in other languages (especially Latin) and obviously a lot of English translated version of scholarly literature written in other languages. The issue is not what language is used to capture the knowledge but how relevant the knowledge is.

I can understand someone who would only refer to literature written in a specific language, most likely in the language they could understand. But to limit the literature review to only language we understand means to limit our knowledge. Knowledge is first captured in the language it was created. During transfer/sharing process, it will be captured in other languages (translation) so that it could be applied universally. It just so happened that today most scholarly literature is written in English or has been translated to English. However, we cannot deny that there are new knowledge being created and captured in other languages.

Before English, the language of Knowledge was Latin and before that it was Arabic. Why? The language used by scholars is the official language for the center of Knowledge creation (used to be Arabic and then Latin, as it is now English).

As in my last post, I do not want to bored you with History lesson. Look it up and you'll discover your own how Knowledge being translated into Arabic from other languages so that scholars in the Islamic world could study and create new knowledge. History repeats itself for Latin and then English.

I propose that language of Knowledge is the language use to create, transfer/share and apply the knowledge. It can be any Language. What's important is the Knowledge, not the language used to capture, transfer/share and apply the knowledge.  Language is only the tool to communicate the knowledge. And yes, we can use sign language or pictorials to share knowledge.

I believe that no specific language can claim sole rights to be the language of knowledge. To do so is to claim that knowledge cannot be created and written in other languages. To do so is to deny knowledge to people who could not speak that language. To do so is to invalidate all knowledge that had been written in other languages. I can't imagine that since half of science knowledge was created in Arabic, translated to Latin then translated to English. There would be no Mathematics as we know it today since the numeral system we use today originated from Arabic, the other choice we have is Roman, or Chinese....what's an English numeral system anyway?

Is English the language of commerce by default?

 This was on The Star (20th October 2011) pg 54.

The views of this writer had aroused me to write my perspective of the issue.  Firstly, let me try to summarize, from my understanding of what the writer was trying to convey.  I sensed the writer was upset over the PPSMI ("Pengajaran & Pembelajaran Sains & Matematik dalam Bahasa Inggeris" = Teaching & Learning of Science and Mathematics in English). The writer when to great extend to argue the importance of English and urge everyone, especially the government not to ignore the importance. Finally, the writer called for action to "refurbish English prowess among Malaysians and repeal the scrapping of PPSMI.

Before I share my views on the subject, allow me to make my stand clear that I am not opposing or supporting the writer's view. I respect the writer's point of view and can see some merit to his arguments.  At the same time, I feel that other point of views to the same arguments.

The writer point out that English is the language for commerce, education and intellectual interactions. At present time that is undeniable.  But then again, Malay used to be the Lingua-franca in this region. Latin and Arabic used to be the language for education and intellectual interactions. If we look up history of the world, we would conclude that any language can the language for commerce, education and intellectual interactions.

Malay was the lingua-franca back then because it was the "official language" for the Melaka Sultanate, which rule commerce in the region and pretty much the same reason for English to be the language of world commerce because the English Speaking world (led by USA) rule world commerce. Despite that, you would find knowledge of local language useful when conducting commerce with certain economic powers like Japan, China, Germany, France, Korea, just to name a few. One might argue that even these economic powers use English as the language for their International Commerce. So my respond is...rewind 3 sentences and read again. I propose that the language for commerce is the language of the trading partner with the upper hand. If we "need" something from our trading partner, we'll communicate in their language.

We cannot insist on our trading partner to speak our language if we are the one in need. But for mutual benefits i.e when both do not have an upper hand, both parties might agree to use a common language comfortable to both; in the present world, English is the commonly acceptable language. But do you know that the United Nations has six official languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish, thus one cannot reject the use of these languages in any international forum/transactions? I let you figure out how these languages became the official languages of the UN. In doing so, you will see my point about having the upper hand makes the language of the trader the language of commerce.

In a similar fashion, Arabic and then Latin was the education and intellectual interaction. I propose that the language of education and intellectual interaction depends on the language that capture and transfer knowledge.  I will write to explain about this in another post....watch out for it.