English in today's F5 Class...

Was rummaging through some stuff around the house the other day and came across some of my dad's books my mom had passed to me. Many were English books. I flipped through and thought it might be useful to me. So today, I took the Std 5 books and copied the passages on the board for my Form 5 students to do.. these are your regular low ability students... but the school labels them as the Cemerlang group. There are two other groups - Terbilang and Gemilang. No use of negative terms, you see...

I have no pets but some of my friends have pets Mary has a black cat. Leela has a white dog. Rosli has two green birds. Salmah has many pretty fish in a fish tank.

1. Who has some birds at home?
2. Who sometimes feeds fish?
3. Who has a pet which will bark at strangers?
4. Who keeps pets in a cage?

Most of my 23 students were able to get the answers right..... maybe it was kinda easy. The second passage...

Yesterday was a holiday. Gopal went fishing. Leela visited an uncle in Lumut. Seng Leng and Ahmad went to the cinema. Rosli helped his father to paint the kitchen. Krishnan did not stay at home. He went to a friend's house.

1. Who did not go out yesterday?
2. Who probably bought tickets yesterday?
3. Who worked with Rosli yesterday?

21 of them had Q1 wrong. 22 had Q3 wrong! The passage above is slightly more difficult in the sense that there are implied facts. What do we have here?? A lack of language or thinking skills? I think probably it's more of the latter cos anything that would require a little brain work would usually cause my students to give up.

In the later part of today's lesson, I gave them a cloze passage (with choices of answers, of course). Majority of them could locate the right answers for the right blanks. But give them a cloze without aid... most of them would not even have any answers. Hence, it is common to get blank sheets if the question requires free writing.

So, regardless of whether Maths and Science are taught in English or in their mother tongue, for this group of students the benefit of them being taught in their mother tongue may be less than what most think.