Familiarity breeds comfort, and sometimes we just have to step back and gain an insight into things outside our comfort zone. I’ve always considered myself to be a KL girl, and so I ignorantly assumed that everyone led a comfortable lifestyle the way most of us in KL do. Attending a college in the middle of a palm oil estate outside of KL and meeting people from different states in Malaysia made me realise that we were worlds apart.

Never did I imagine that even top students from rural areas in Malaysia were still struggling to converse in English. I also never imagined that topics of discussion that I used to consider normal were considered taboo amongst those same students. The sad part of it is that these were the fortunate students who despite their English illiteracy were the cream of the crop where they came from. But what happens to those who weren’t so lucky? Do they get casted aside to the sidelines?

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I recently went to a primary school where most of the students were the orang asli  children and again I was shocked at the difference between it and my old primary school. Each standard only had one class, and the school only consisted of one academic block. Before a few of my friends and I started teaching, the teachers told us beforehand that the students didn’t understand English and so we were to give simple instructions in Malay.

I started to think. This is a primary school, and if the students are not trained to converse in English now, ...

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