Malaysia’s Globalization, Educational Language Policy and Nation-Building 51
The development of international schools was given a big boost in
2010 when the government put in place a host of measures to scale up
these schools to capitalize on the immense economic gains generated by
these schools. For instance, the government provided international school
operators with support on the issues of land acquisition and soft loans. It
is expected that by 2020, international schools will generate gross national
income amounting to RM2.6 billion and create approximately 10,000 jobs
in the country. The scaling up of international schools was one of the entry
point projects of the Economic Transformation Programme launched by the
Performance Management and Delivery Unit (PEMANDU) of the Prime
Minister’s Department (PEMANDU 2010). Subsequent developments
showed that there was a marked increase in the number of international
schools, i.e. from sixty-three schools in 2010 to around ninety-seven
schools in little more than three years (Hamilton 2014), surpassing the
government’s target of eighty-seven international schools by 2020. This
impressive growth of international schools was also spurred by the decision
of the government to abolish enrolment quota imposed on local students
(Chi 2014). Alarmingly, non-Malays from the middle and upper strata
of the society, in particular the Chinese, form the bulk of local students
attending these international schools. Admittedly, such an enrolment trend
has resulted in an ethnic divide within the Malaysian educational system.
This ethnic divide will be widened if more non-Malays are to opt for these
international schools. While the high fees charged by international schools
used to deter many parents, especially those from the middle class, to enrol
their children in these schools, they are now in an affordable position to
enrol their children in these schools with the establishment of more mid-
and lower-range international schools in recent years (Chi 2014).
From the foregoing, it is clear that efforts by the government to
strengthen the proficiency of English among Malaysian students may be to
the advantage of the non-Malays with serious repercussions to the nation-
building process. The widening of ethnic divide within the Malaysian
educational system is certainly a threat to the nation building process. What
is more threatening is that this widening of ethnic divide will also lead to
the widening of linguistic divide, which is straddled between a high-status
(H) language (English) and a low-status (L) language (Malay). From the
perspective of sociolinguistics, the H language is often associated with
power and those who cannot master it are usually socially marginalized
(Spolsky 1998; Shin 2013). In contrast, the L language is only useful in