I refer to your article Policy on English short-sighted, say veteran educationists . I totally agree with A Rajaguru and William Doraisamy's points of view. However, I find it so difficult to believe that the National Teacher of the Year 1998 Dr Yahaya Ibrahim would make the following statement:

"If these American teachers, equipped with three months' intensive Malay language courses at the East-West Centre in Hawaii, were able to teach in Malay for two years with an option for another year, why can't we do it in English now?"

The Americans were here to teach the students using the students' mother tongue, namely, Malay. But did the Americans teach in Malay as good as in English?

But now, the most important question is whether our students today can understand what is being taught by some teachers who can only speak broken English or not at all. Furthermore, a person who is good in English may not be good in teaching Science and Mathematics due to their lack of knowledge in these two subjects.

I am a Mathematics lecturer who didn't speak English at all when I first started my college life 10 years ago. I also didn't understand what my Canadian lecturers said during the lectures because of their accent. But I still did very well for all subjects as I could write and read quite well and most importantly, I had strong basic knowledge of Science and Mathematics which I learned using languages familiar to me in Chinese primary school and national secondary school.

We must face the reality that more and more of our English teachers are ironically not qualified to teach the subject.

This was my sister's experience while at a teacher's training college. The lecturers never really taught them anything. During examinations, these lecturers would conveniently disappear for about half to an hour. You don't need a good imagination to wonder what happened in the exam hall in the invigilators' absence. In the end, nobody failed their English papers.

As for my own experience, I would say during my six years of study from Remove class to Form 5, I only met one qualified English teacher who really knew how to make the subject easy for us to learn. It was in that year that I started to learn the differences between "is, are, was, were" and ended up getting a distinction for my SRP exam.

So, the main reason for our students not being able to master English was not because we didn't use English to teach Science and Mathematics since young but because we did not have enough qualified English teachers and it was not compulsory to pass the subject to earn a certificate of education.

So stop looking for scapegoats. Face the reality and revamp/change our political and educational system and policies!