English in Singapore and Malaysia 23
and in Sarawak, English retained its status as an official language until
- In 1969, riots broke out, testament to the high level of emotion among
the Malay community, especially among Malay nationalists, about the
issue of language.
In promoting Malay, Malaysia’s language policies clearly relegated the
English language to a secondary position compared to Malay — it was to be
a second language, lower in status and importance to the Malay language
(Asmah 1985). In fact, it had no official status, given that unlike Mandarin
and Tamil, which could serve as mediums of instructions in national-type
schools, it no longer had any capital within the institutional education
framework. Yet this rise in status of the Malay language was curtailed in
some measure by the continued reliance of the business community on
English, given its clearly dominant role in the global marketplace (Gill
2005). Gill also suggests that demand for scientific and technological
knowledge could not be met even though much effort was expended in
translation work, which meant that students had no alternative but to learn
English. The linguistic capital that English commanded might be seen to
have culminated in 2002, when Malaysia instituted a dramatic change in
its language policy, known as PPSMI (Pengajaran dan Pembelajaran Sains
dan Matematik dalam Bahasa Inggeris) that reversed the government’s
Malay-dominant language policy and switched the medium of instruction
from Malay back to English for the subjects of science and mathematics.
The new policy mandated that all fully aided government schools should
roll out teaching these two subjects in English from January 2003 to new
cohorts of primary and secondary school students.
This change in language policy, although often portrayed as sudden,
was in fact already presaged by the continuing trickle of policies that saw
English being acknowledged as central to not only science and technology,
but to education in general. In 1993, Malaysia’s Prime Minister, Mahathir
Mohamad, announced that English would be allowed as a medium of
instruction in universities and colleges for the teaching of science. Then
in 1995, the centrality of English re-emerged in the Malaysian education
system in a guideline issued by the Ministry of Education that allowed
the use of English in tutorials, seminars, assignments, foreign language
classes and other similar activities (Zaaba et al. 2013). These policies were
legislated as the Education Act 1996, which allowed the use of English
as the medium of instruction for technical areas and post-secondary
courses. In conjunction with this was the 1996 Private Higher Education