English in Singapore and Malaysia 31
population (Singapore Department of Statistics 2010c, p. 1,^2 Alsagoff 2012).
Without a real national language to unify this melting pot, can Singapore
really build a cohesive nation with a clear national identity?
In contrast, Malaysia’s future will hold a different set of challenges,
the foremost of which will be to build a credible and strong education
system around its new language policy. Malaysia’s poor showings in
PISA points to the challenge it faces in ensuring that it can develop a
workforce that can realize its economic potential — it is a country rich
in natural resources, and is well placed geographically to become a hub
for Asia. While carving its own path in terms of the insistence of Malay
as the medium of instruction, Malaysia has to ensure that its education
system equips students with the skills and knowledge required for
the twenty-first century workplace. Although the Malaysian education
system has made significant progress in ensuring the accessibility of
education to especially the rural areas, it must now move towards
an improvement in the quality of its education, especially when it is
clear how weakly the Malaysian students perform relative to the other
nations, even those far less economically wealthy (Ministry of Education,
Malaysia 2012). To address these challenges, Malaysia has proposed an
ambitious plan of reform as outlined in the Malaysia Education Blueprint
2013–2025. However, its quest to meet universal standards in areas of
reading, mathematics and science will be tested in the implementation
and enactment as Malaysia continues to grapple with keeping up with
the pace of development that requires an enormous effort in translating
information that is primarily in English. Its relationship with English will
also be an area that will be constantly tested as globalization continues
its rise. How it will continue to ensure that its ideological stance of
language as right can be balanced with the increasing needs of the nation
to ensure a high level of communicative competence in English will
be a challenge. While it is clear that Malay — Bahasa Malaysia — will
continue to be the main language of communication and the language
for nation-building as is Malaysia’s intent, it remains to be seen whether
moving forward, that Malay can be its main language of knowledge. And
while Phan, Kho and Chng (2013) make a worthy case that MBMMBI
is “a necessary, firm, strategic and timely response by the Malaysian
government to globalization, nation-building, the increasing international
role of English, and the pressure to maintain national cultural identity
in today’s world” (p. 68), it remains to be seen whether in its enactment