This is a theoretical paper that examines how colonisation, globalisation and a crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic have had a significant influence on the development of inclusive education policy and practice in Malaysia. Drawing on the ideas of dependency from Farid Alatas, and Carol Bacchi's focus on the identification of the underlying problem within policies, as well as Stephen Ball's policy cycle, we highlight how global events have repercussions at a policy level now and into the future. This paper contributes to the wider inclusive education debate through the innovative use of these three different theoretical lenses, informed by Asian historical experiences and cultural practices. This is significant as together they emphasise the impact of colonisation, globalisation and a pandemic on the process of inclusive education policy development in Malaysia as we argue for a repositioning of education to recognise learning that goes on outside of the school gates.

This systematic literature review (SLR) delves into current research trends and challenges in articles related to China’s Emerging Engineering Education (EEE), as indexed by the Web of Science (WOS). This study focuses on three significant research questions: 1) What are the current research trends based on existing literature? 2) What is the current development status of China’s emerging engineering disciplines? and 3) What are the future research directions? In examining the current development status of China’s EEE, this study reviewed topics such as the development of EEE policy and practice teaching, as well as related challenges and issues. The future research directions suggested in this study emphasize the significance of the institutionalization of Emerging Engineering Research (EER), fostering collaborative networks and global dialogues, bridging the gap between theoretical research and practical applications, embracing innovative models and practices, integrating new principles into curricula, evaluating educational interventions and programs, and exploring interdisciplinary approaches. This review provides insights into the current state of engineering education in China and highlights future research directions to address new challenges and opportunities in this field.

In the dynamic landscape of primary education, assessment plays a pivotal role in shaping the learning journey of young students. The evolving educational paradigms and the diverse needs of students necessitates a nuanced understanding of assessment practices employed across different educational systems. In this comparative study which involves three British colonial countries, Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia and Maldives, we seek to unravel the paradigm shifts in assessment at the primary level from a historical perspective. We discuss the intricacies of assessment systems in each country and examine how policymakers reform the assessment system, while attempting to seek a balance between strengthening national identities and aligning the systems with global development. We compared and analysed the primary school assessments from four dimensions: shift from national standardised examinations to school-based assessment; assessment in transdisciplinary curriculum; language policies in assessment; and reporting of assessment outcomes. The findings of this comparative analysis show that there are similarities and differences between the assessment systems in these three countries in the post-colonial era. This study also reveals the common patterns and unique trends in assessment that take place across the three countries.

Epistemic violence refers to the silencing and displacing of a system of knowledge deemed to be inferior by another system of knowledge self-perceived as superior. In postcolonial context, it refers to the dominance and imposition of Western ways of perceiving the world by displacing the non-Western ways of perceiving the world. Colonial discourse is so encompassing in the postcolonial countries that students come to the classroom with assumptions that carry baggage of epistemic violence. According to Freire, the manifestations of this global “theme” may take particular dimensions in particular societies. Critical interrogation of epistemic violence requires identification of the particular manifestations of epistemic violence in particular societies. Following the approach of critical discourse analysis, this paper attempts to explore how epistemic violence manifests itself in the student assumptions exposed in their classroom interactions in an undergraduate classroom in Bangladesh, a postcolonial country. The findings reveal that besides the Western form of epistemic violence, there are local varieties of epistemic violence in Bangladesh. The discourses contributing to epistemic violence have been so ingrained in society that they appear as symbolic capital exercising symbolic violence where education plays a big role. The manifestations of epistemic violence in the context of Bangladesh revealed in this study have implications for framing critical instruction for problematising epistemic violence in postcolonial countries like Bangladesh.

Personal pronouns are a linguistic device that is used to engage students at various educational levels. Personal pronouns are multifunctional and their functions range from inclusion to exclusion and include establishing rapport with students. In this chapter we compare the use of personal pronouns at university and secondary school levels. Our previous study (Yeo & Ting 2014) showed the frequent use of you in lecture introductions (2170 instances in the 37373-word corpus) to acknowledge the presence of students. The arts lecturers were more inclusive than the science lecturers reflected in the less frequent use of exclusive-we and we for one as well as the frequent use of you-generalized. We have also compiled and analyzed a 43511-word corpus from 15 English lessons in three Malaysian secondary schools. This corpus yielded 2019 instances of personal pronoun use. The results showed that you was the most frequently used personal pronoun followed by we and I. You-audience was used more than you-generalized and the main function was to give instructions to students. The teachers appeared to be more directive than the lecturers in the previous study who sometimes used the inclusive-we for you and I and we for I to lessen the social distance with students indicating that the discourse functions of personal pronouns vary with the educational context. The findings suggest that educators can be alerted to the versatility of personal pronouns for example for engaging students in the lesson and for asserting authority in the subject matter.

The purpose of this study is to conceptually explore and investigate the attributes of varying monologic discourses in the classroom, in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of monologicality. Data for this study comprised transcripts of lessons conducted by a teacher from a larger national study on Year 7 classroom practices. Constant comparative analysis of these lessons revealed a continuum of monologicality involving different variants of monologic discourses that arose from the decoupling of voice and perspective. Along this continuum, there are varying configurations of voice and perspective: ranging from mono-voiced, mono-perspectival discourse to multi-voiced, mono-perspectival discourse. This can potentially provide a bridge to the dialogic side of the continuum, where multi-voiced, multi-perspectival discourse is represented. This conceptual framework provides a basis to examine teaching and classroom discourse along this continuum. Further interrogation using this framework can inform teaching practice, future classroom discourse research, as well as teacher education curriculum.

This chapter explores issues pertaining to the tertiary education of Malaysian Indians. Community imperatives for pursuing tertiary study and the policy context affecting the sector are discussed. Pathways and public and private tertiary institutional provisions are examined with a view to options and routes that students may take, including through community-based educational initiatives. Key concerns include access and equity issues, support for learning at the tertiary level and the issue of employability. Potential directions for assisting the community to move forward in tertiary education are also considered.

Currently, in many developing countries, there have been intensified efforts by policymakers to push for decentralisation of education as part of a neo-liberal reform agenda to improve school management efficiency and cater to localised needs. In the Malaysian context, the government has attempted further decentralisation of autonomy in selected public schools, marking a shift from the post-independence centralised education structure. This has led to the development of Cluster Schools of Excellence, practising some form of school-based management and accorded autonomy in the selection of niche areas, programme planning and programme implementation. Drawing primarily on the interview narratives from school administrators as key policy actors, this study examines how autonomy is manifested at the micro-level and how the school administrators exercise their agency when they are accorded autonomy. Using a decentralised centralism framework, the tensions and complexities in education policy implementation are highlighted in this study. Findings reveal that agency and autonomy are held by both macro and micro-level policy actors in varying degrees, and that school administrators have fundamental agency in school-level policy implementation. The study also explores the dynamics of the decentralisation process and raises the issue of re-centralisation of authority through decentralisation of education.

This paper offers an analysis of the lexical item confusion in opinion-editorials published by a Malaysian newspaper. The data was collected from The Star, a Malaysian English daily, between 1 January 2009 and 30 June 2010. To contextualize, in April 2009, the previous Prime Minister departs and the country welcomes a new leader with an apparently nationalist identity discourse of 1Malaysia (Malaysia as an inclusive nation). This is also when religious debates surfaced regularly in the country’s courtrooms and media. The findings of the study reveal that the authors of op-eds used the lexical item, confusion, to articulate normative and non-normative positions regarding various religious issues in Malaysia (e.g., Allah controversy, Islamic jurisprudence and religious conversion). Those who argued for the normative view, confusion arose within the discursive space of the religion of Islam; while for those who argued against the normative view, confusion arose due to the differences between the religious and the secular positions. It is important to note that the construction of meaning depended on both the semantic field of the lexical item and the context of utterance. However, what is more crucial to follow is that the term confusion served as an ideological tool in the Malaysian context to further the agenda of those individuals who are representatives or spokespersons for specific ideological groups within a contested polity.

High stakes assessment practices have been the most common summative assessments in schools. To address the shortcomings of the summative assessments, Assessment for Learning (AfL) was introduced to provide learners more active feedback and autonomy in their learning progression. In Malaysia, school-based assessments were introduced to reduce the dependency on summative assessments. This paper examines the espoused and the levels of enacted AfL practices of Malaysian Year 7 teachers. A survey and video research design was employed in this study where data were collected from a sample of teachers who taught Mathematics, Science, English Language, and Malay Language. To elicit teachers' espoused Aft practices, a questionnaire was used while video recordings were utilized as a form of classroom observation to elicit teachers' enacted AfL practices. The results indicated that there seemed to be agreement among teachers' espoused Aft, practices with AfL strategies for three dimensions which were Sharing Learning Target, Engineering Good Classroom Discussions, and Peer Assessment. The enacted AfL practices of these teachers were predominantly at the lowest levels for all dimensions of AfL practices. This study was not able to establish any relationship between the espoused and enacted AfL practices. It is suggested that both, espoused and enacted Afl, practices were be brought to light as foundations for continuous improvement. It is hoped that these results would inform and influence policy makers about the future direction and decision making in improving the quality of school-based assessment implementation.

Problematisation is the means by which critical pedagogy attempts to destabilise power relations related to gender, race, class, identity etc. Studies in critical pedagogy in language teaching explore different ways of problematisation treating problematisation as classroom practice. However, they do not specifically address the teacher’s struggle in employing problematisation and the learners’ experience with it in classroom settings. Hence the complexity of problematisation remains neglected in research in critical pedagogy in classroom contexts. This article explores the notion of problematisation through an analysis of a writing lesson involving undergraduate students in Bangladesh. It analyses both the teacher’s and a student’s encounters with and reflections on problematisation throughout the lesson, and reveals that problematisation embodies complexities, and is empowering when it is self-reflexive.

English for specific purposes, ESP, has been taught in Iran’s higher educational centers for years. For certain reasons, however, these courses have been marginalized and less exposed to expert’s criticism and evaluation. To evaluate the effectiveness of these courses in assisting the students to achieve the desired educational objectives, non-participant observations of ESP classes in two of the country’s institutions of higher education were carried out. Based on our observations, we found that developing the reading skills was the main objective of these classes. Moreover, it was found that the students in their struggle to comprehend the assigned reading texts had problems in recognizing the basic sentence structure, the grammatical functions of gerunds, polysemous words and passive voice. The level of difficulty of the texts was found to be the source of reading problems as well. Considering the findings from the observed classes, the paper offers some practical suggestions for qualitative promotion of the classes.

This article reports the findings on classroom practice in Malaysia, as the nation attempts to transform the education system to better prepare children for the 21st Century. The goal of the study is to describe an overview of classroom practice in Malaysia, to provide essential empirical data to inform discussions in one of the most important areas in education - what happens in the classroom in relation to national aspirations, policies and practices. A random sampling of 24 secondary schools from across the country led to a sample size of 140 teachers. Lessons facilitated by these teachers were video recorded and analysed. The findings revealed that classroom practice was largely the same throughout the country, and lacked the kinds of activities widely associated with creating engaging and thinking classrooms. Systemic issues and possible ways forward are discussed in light of these findings.

Malaysia is ethnolinguistically diverse.According to Ethnologue, for a population of over 30 million, 134 languages are spoken within its territory, of which 112 are indigenous and 22 non-indigenous.Against this backdrop of ethnolinguistic vitality, only some of these languages figure in the formal education system either as the medium of instruction (as in the case of Malay and, for some time, English) or as a subject within the school curriculum (as in the case of Iban, Kadazandusn, Tamil, Chinese and Arabic).This edited volume, which is published under the Routledge Critical Studies in Asian Education series, provides an overview of the "positioning of these languages" within the education system, "for the purpose of integration of the Malaysian peoples" (p.1).In this regard, the "positioning" of languages within the education system is ostensibly political in nature, and is tied closely to Malaysia's postcolonial responses to the project of nation-building, of developing national unity with a population that is linguistically and also culturally and socially diverse.The book is organized in 10 chapters, each authored or co-authored by key researchers in the area.Chapter 1 of the book, entitled 'Positioning languages in the Malaysian education system' sets out to frame the central arguments of the book.It maps out the linguistic landscape of the country and describes the historical and linguistic forces that contributed to the positioning of the Malay language as the national language.The chapter provides an overview of the different school systems in Malaysia, each with its own medium of instruction, namely Malay medium national schools and vernacular schools in which Chinese and Tamil are media of instruction, which were established in colonial Malaya in light of the migration of Chinese and Tamils into the mining and plantation sectors.The chapter also highlights the shifts in status of English medium schools, established in the colonial period but which were discontinued beginning in the 1970s.The positon of English as a "strong second language' within the school system and programmes to address this are also discussed here and taken up further in chapter 3.Chapter 2 picks up on the case for the choice of Malay as the national language and highlights key issues in the implementation of the National Language Policy.In arguing for the case of Malay as national language, the chapter offers an historical overview of the shift involved when Malay vernacular schools in the colonial period became National schools in the post-independence era.This shift, in principle at least, indicated a shift from an ethnic focus to a national focus, where Malay served as the lingua franca for the multilingual, multiethnic polity.Even as Malay replaced English as the medium of instruction at university level, the chapter draws attention to the rise of Malay-English bilingualism not just in tertiary level education, but throughout the school system under the MBMMBI slogan.MBMMBI was an acronym for "To uphold Malay and strengthen English," indicative of the contemporary postcolonial relationship between the languages.Chapter 3 examines the three levels which drive English usage in Malaysia: national, regional and global.At the national level the chapter traces the changes in the role of English within the education system over time; some of the policy flip-flops in recent years regarding the role of English as medium of instruction for Mathematics and Science subjects; and some of the challenges the country faces vis-à-vis English proficiency levels of graduates; some 44,000 graduate remain unemployed and their proficiency has been cited as a reason for employability.At the regional level, English has been adopted as the 'working language' within ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.And at a global level, the continuing large numbers of Malaysian students who seek tertiary education in Anglophone countries or the branch campuses of foreign universities in Malaysia as well as the

In a heterogeneous country like Malaysia, it is not surprising that education policy has often interacted with the politics of race, religion and language. The nature of these interactions, however, has evolved over time as policymakers, politicians and citizens dealt with the challenges of globalization, a growing economy and shifting demands of an increasingly complex employment market. This chapter distils the views of two politicians, one formerly from the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) Coalition and the other from the opposition, in order to highlight the continued influence of race and religion in the politics of education but also the emergence of other contending forces of influence, including market-based pressures, especially at the higher education level. Through the various narratives and questions posed, a dynamic and evolving education policy landscape is revealed. The views of both politicians show the tensions and contestations between moving away from a race-based lens of education policy and maintaining a tight control of education policy that serves the larger political interests in the country.

This video study examines teachers. questioning practices in English language classrooms in Malaysia, and how different types of questions, wait time, and reaction moves influence classroom interaction. The study found that although there was an overarching monologicality across all classrooms, teachers. questioning practices were not limited to the typical, monologic mixture of display questions, non-existent or short wait time, and/or reaction moves which could obstruct student talk. There were also opportunities for dialogicality initiated through teachers. employment of referential questions, longer wait time, and/or reaction moves which could facilitate advanced student talk, but monologicality in classroom interaction persisted. Such observation directs our attention to the understanding and further contemplation that nurturing dialogicality is not a mere issue of strategy use.

This study investigated the writing parameters of a research paper by multiple authors who formed a research team in a public university in Malaysia. Drafts of the research paper were produced through the research activities and writings of the participant researchers. By observations, interviews, and textual analysis of drafts, we studied the three main parameters that each written text naturally contains: who wrote the text, what the text was, and to whom the text was written. Participants in the present study comprised a team of researchers from different disciplines. They conducted a project in science, wrote, and published their findings in an on-line journal. The findings indicate that the authentic task of writing a multi-authored research paper by a team of experienced researchers is beyond and more complicated than fulfilling a basic task of writing in the context of a class by a novice student. The experiences through which the participant researchers of this study produced the drafts of the article are greatly valuable for the academics who are planning to publish their findings in the form of an article. This study has implications for teaching of writing academic texts, particularly writing of research papers.

This article reports a part of a study conducted among in-service teachers in a Malaysian secondary school. The focus of the main study was on teacher learning in teacher literature circles. However, this article focuses on the roles played by teachers during teacher literature circles. The roles are described and identified as they emerged from the data. Three teachers and the researcher met informally in the school library and discussed the new text once a week over a period of seven weeks. The teacher literature circle discussions were recorded and transcribed. The study found that the emergent roles facilitated the teachers’ meaning making processes, as the teachers tried to understand the text, which they had to teach to their students.