Curriculum Studies in Malaysia

INTRODUCTION Education in Malaysia has undergone many changes throughout the years, from the Razak Report in 1956, and recently in 2009, our Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak came out with the idea of fostering unity and prosperity among different cultures through the concept of 1Malaysia. The 1Malaysia concept emphasises on the importance of every race and their roles and contributions in national growth (Hamdan and Mohamad, 2011). Thus, it is important to inculcate unity and harmony to promote racial integration and close relationship and teachers should play their role to achieve the objective (BERNAMA, 2010). To examine how the concept of 1Malaysia could be inculcated in a language learning programme, this essay will discuss thoroughly on the designed programme with the applied philosophies, learning approaches and strategies that incorporated together with the 1Malaysia concept. Examples of activities from the programme will be provided to show the link between 1Malaysia concept and the teaching and learning approaches.
BACKGROUND
This is a 12 hours programme created for Form 5 students who have just finished their Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) examination. This programme will be conducted in three hours a week, one hour per lesson in about four weeks. The participants of the programme are students from intermediate to high proficiency level in English. This programme will involve students from different culture, including Malay, Chinese and Indian. The rationale is to create a multicultural classroom so that to foster unity and teamwork across different culture through activities in the classroom would be possible and achievable. Students are selected from SPM candidates because skills such as giving impromptu speech and presenting PowerPoint presentations are very much needed in the tertiary education studies and it is believed that by developing such skills, after students have graduated they would able to converse with colleagues and fulfil

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