WE are now rolling up our sleeves to brainstorm together on how to improve English. Besides calling for a review of the English curriculum, Education Minister Muhyiddin Yassin and his team have also visited Edith Cowan University in Australia, and the university agreed to help Malaysian teachers and students to improve their English proficiency. Other than these efforts, I think we should also encourage students to learn English online.
In the pre-Internet era, people had to spend money to obtain English learning materials like books, magazines, dictionaries, newspapers, movies and documentaries.
Students from poor families who did not have access to good libraries were usually lagging behind their peers who could afford all the above-mentioned English learning materials.
Today, the discrepancy between the haves and have-nots in terms of English learning has indeed been narrowed by the Internet as long as one has a computer and broadband.
For news, English readers can simply log on to news sites such as BBC, CNN, Asia Sentinel, Time and The Guardian to get a glimpse of what is going on around the world. For expanding vocabulary, we have options like dictionary.com, Longman dictionary online version and idioms.thefreedictionary.com. For listening, we have youtube.com and we can listen to great English speakers like David Cameron and Obama. And for improving one’s knowledge, we have wikipedia and wikihow; and for further learning, youtube.com/edu and scitable.com.
These websites are our treasures in English learning and it’s all for free. All these learning materials are indeed just a click away when we have computers and broadband. English teachers and lecturers should encourage students to fully utilise these free resources so that everyone could learn by themselves through the Internet.
Perhaps with stronger self-learning ability among students, the burden of educators would be relieved a bit.
YEOW BOON KIAT,
Petaling Jaya.
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