Malaysia, Bilingual Education in

History of Bilingual Schools in Malaysia

Apart from community-based Islamic and Christian missionary schools, initial attempts to provide formal education in Malaysia began under British occupation. The first English-medium and Tamil-medium schools were built in 1816, and the first Chinese school was built in 1917. These schools originally offered instruction in a single language, with the aim of promoting literacy in English, Tamil, and Chinese, respectively. Upon attaining independence from the British in 1957, the Malaysian government decided that the chief means of uniting the country would be through education. Language education policies were carefully formulated, since language education was influenced by communal politics. As a result, the Education Ordinance 1957 and the Education Act of 1961 were implemented to found a national education system promoting cultural, social, economic, and political development of the new nation. A corollary to this ideal was the use of the Malay language as the national language, while preserving and sustaining the growth of the language and culture of other ethnic groups in the country.

These were antecedents to the development of a unique form of bilingual education in Malaysia: a single school language serving as a medium of instruction for core curricula, in parallel with the teaching of other languages—national language, home language, community language, mother tongue or foreign language—as separate subjects.

Developments in Language Policy

Prior to 1970, primary school education in government schools was available in four different languages: Bahasa Melayu (Malay), Chinese, Tamil, and English; secondary school education was available only in Bahasa Melayu and English. As formal language planning began in earnest in the 1970s, English-medium primary and secondary schools were gradually replaced with Bahasa Melayu-medium schools. Chinese-medium and Indian-medium primary schools continued to provide education in their respective languages. In sum, bilingual education in Malaysia may be defined as the provision of academic support for two or more languages at the school level. This underscores a concerted effort on the part of the government to make mother tongue education for major language groups accessible and affordable.

An important development at this stage was that the national language, Bahasa Melayu, became the medium of instruction in all secondary schools and a compulsory language to be offered in all Chinese and Tamil primary schools. All students had to pass the Bahasa Melayu examination in order to be awarded the Malaysian Certificate of Education at the end of secondary school and in subsequent years to gain entry to public universities. English-medium schools were phased out between 1971 and 1983, and English was relegated from its role as medium of instruction to that of a compulsory subject in all primary and secondary schools.

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