The Mere Understanding: Representation Reading in Practice

Abstract

Secondary school teachers of English in Malaysia find themselves on the horns of a dilemma at the moment. Something of an identity crisis seems to be taking hold. And the crux of the problem seems to me to lie between ESL and EFL: is English actually a second language or is it a foreign language?

The answer is that for the majority of students - and they are the people that matter English is not the same English as it was for the generation teachers who are now thirty-something (or a little more). The Ministry of Education's move towards reinstating English as both a linguistic and cultural force has brought out some of the issues which need to be highlighted, discussed, and evaluated in the sphere of language teaching for the 1990s.

Language teaching is not a static subject. Just as language itself is in a constant state of flux, the discipline of language teaching is constantly moving forward, evolving, revaluing itself and its terminology, the tricks of the trade and the methodologies it employs. I recently wrote, with a conscious intention to disturb superficially calm waters: 'In future years, the absence of imaginative content in language teaching will be considered to have marked a primitive stage of the

discipline.' (McRae, 1991: vii).

The very positive and forward-looking policy of integrating literature into language learning underscores the fact that Malaysia is at a turning point in language education. The implications of these are considerable, especially at university teacher-training level, where a concentration on ESL has led to many qualified teachers feeling inadequately equipped to cope with the immense difficulties of an EFL teaching situation: a situation which one teacher graphically described to me in Kelantan as "in Form 5 some of them still cannot put the subject, the verb, and the object in the correct order in a sentence."