Language is unlike other subjects you learn later in life. It is what makes us different from animals in how we are able to think ahead of what we want to do and reflect on what we have done. It allows us to represent our thoughts in symbols and ponder on things that only exist only in our minds. How the child learns language is a phenomenon that is not repeated in other stages of life and is a testament to the mind-boggling development that takes place within the child in the birth to preschool age.
I had ideals that my children will learn both English and Malay from a young age. That I can speak both languages to my children from the womb and that they will in a sense have two mother tongues. Alas, the ideal that spins in my mind was easier than the discipline and effort needed to carry it out. Before I knew it, years, and then children passed, and I have children Malay by birth but with English as their first language.
This would not have been a stressful fact if not for the second-language policy we have in Singapore that requires students to have at least a mother tongue-read Malay, Mandarin or Tamil- as a first language at O levels as a university entry requirement. I do believe if one takes the polytechnic route, a mother tongue taken as a second language would cover it.
I realise, too late to take advantage of the absorbent mind of the child, that the regret goes beyond examinations; that my children can't speak their own language and this affects their identity, that they can't speak to their elders in Malay, that they will not be able to pursue religious studies under Malay-speaking asatizahs and so forth.
Islam however teaches us that regrets are unacceptable and unproductive, instead we 'taubat' or stop doing what is wrong, and we do the right thing. As I find 'tuition' painful and did not have deep pockets to send three of my remaining homeschoolers to tuition for every academic crisis, I had to find an alternative on my own.
This was the starting point of our Malay online classes and to date I have two and a half years worth of curriculum across five levels. It has been a sharp learning curve and I'd like to share one lesson of many that I have learned from this journey.
I remember reading suggestions for Malay to be taught with English in schools in response to the growth of more English-speaking households here. I am not aware of whether this idea has been taken up, but doing this has benefited us much.
This is because English and Malay has a few common grounds that can be leveraged on. Firstly, we use the same alphabets with minor differences in pronunciation of some letters like 'c' and 'o'. Thus, when teaching reading the child who is already literate in English can be taught in almost the same way or you may not even have to 'teach' him to read because he can already put apart and bring together syllables to make words.
At word level, there are some English words that are phonetically the same as its Malay counterpart with just minor differences in spelling. For e.g. telephone and telefon and pencil and pensel. This language borrowing also happens between Malay and Arabic as seen the names of the days of the week and 'mumkin' and 'mungkin'. A child already familiar with English can easily remember the Malay terms for them.
As a child reaches primary level and learns Grammar in his English lessons, the parts of grammar can be easily translated to the grammar that is taught in Malay. For e.g. when a child knows what is a verb, an action word, we can easily relate that this is the same as Kata Kerja, perkataan yang menunjukkan perbuatan. He already knows the essence of what a verb is and we are just adding another label to that form.
Comprehension is a challenge because not only would children in non-Malay speaking families not have much life experiences scripted in Malay, say ordering food and sharing about their day, they would also more likely not have been read to nor read much in Malay. They are thus deprived not only of the semantics or word meanings and their relations, they also lack the pragmatics which would for e.g. help them predict and infer text.
Parents can play a role here by reading more to their children in Malay. From reading to my students, I find this to be a tiring effort because most of the time, they don't know what I'm talking about. It's ok to go a few grades down and read picture books with older elementary kids. Alternatively, read a translation of a famous book your child has. There are also books that have two or more languages in them. I personally prefer the translations to be in separate books because firstly, it's distracting, and secondly, your child would pay more attention to the language he's familiar with, but I think it's acceptable and you can't really buy two of the same books all the time.
I think the easiest way is to speak to your children in Malay more. Most importantly, never think that your child is asking something too basic to be asked and point them to other ways they can learn the language independently without having you to be a translator all the time, for e.g. using google translate (it's not the best but it works generally), dual language dictionaries and my favourite DBP . Your child may need some help navigating DBP at first, though.
As a last word, no matter how little the effort, consistency will bring in the best rewards. (but if your child is already in middle school, you may have to put in more, much more.: ). I also attach here my presentation at a recent homeschooling fair.
