Malaysia’s Globalization, Educational Language Policy and Nation-Building 43
main feature of the global economy following the advent of ICT that has
accelerated the pace of globalization.
Alarmingly, because of poor proficiency in English among students,
the Malaysian government is unable to optimize its human capital
development to enhance its global competitiveness, especially in the
expanding (globalized) private sector that relies on English as the working
language. This is indicated by the high rate of graduate unemployment
in this particular sector. The poor quality of graduates produced by the
public institutions of higher learning is also a major stumbling block to the
optimizing of human capital development. One of the contributing factors
is their poor proficiency of English following the switch from English-
medium education to Malay-medium education beginning in the 1970s.
The fact is that despite this switch of medium of instruction, Malaysian
students continue to rely on English academic texts because of the lack
of Malay translated academic texts and this is where their proficiency
of English is found to be most wanting (Gill 2002; Khoo 2008). In fact,
students spend more time translating these texts than actually studying
the subject (Sato 2007).
It is against the above backdrop that increased emphasis has been given
to English in the Malaysian educational system beginning in the early 1990s.
However, this change of educational language policy was also facilitated by
the pragmatic attitude of the political elites within the Malaysian coalition
government, in particular the Malay political elites affiliated to the United
Malays National Organisation (UMNO) — the dominant political party in
the Malaysian ruling coalition. Since independence, UMNO has been the
main driving force in the upholding of the Malay language as the main
thrust of the country’s educational language policy. The question then
is: Why did the UMNO political elites choose to change an educational
language policy that has favoured the Malays all this while? The answer
lies in the implementation of the New Economic Policy (NEP) (1971–90),
a social engineering policy that was originally implemented to redress
the socioeconomic disparity between the Malays and non-Malays in the
country but eventually favoured the socioeconomic mobility of the Malays.
It is generally accepted that the NEP had led to the emergence of Malay
professionals who formed a new Malay middle class (Abdul Rahman
Embong 2001; Maznah 2005; Rahimah 2012). These professionals were
subsequently co-opted into the UMNO power structure and replaced
the Malay teachers as the mainstay of UMNO politics. It is this group of