英语论文网

Ministry of Education (MoE), in its efforts to improve standards of Brunei primary school children's command of English, introduced a new Education System called ‘National Education System for the 21st Century’ or ‘Sistem Pendidikan Negara Abad ke 21’, in short, SPN21.

The new SPN 21curriculum identifies English language as one of the core or important subject for all levels of education (from the beginning of Pre-school until Year 11). SPN 21 aims to lead students towards life-long learning. In general the aim of the new curriculum is seen to enhance pupils’ capability to master the Malay and English Language in terms of listening, speaking, reading and writing, accentuating on the importance of these four macro skills.

It is important that learners need to achieve good grades in English in order to apply for higher education in Brunei and overseas. The main problem, however, is that despite years of learning and exposure to English language in schools, learners still do not perform well in English Language. In a recent study conducted by National Study of Student Competencies in Mathematics and English, NSSCME (2008), it was found that efforts in the writing task were frustrated, as learners of Year 4 and Year 6 had limited vocabulary. It also stated that the children had difficulty in writing simple sentences and also in sequencing sentences. There was a need for learners to practice, extensively, in expressing their own ideas in simple sentences.

Thus, there appears a need for strategies to enable children to be able to expand their vocabulary words, practices in expressing their own ideas in simple sentences. To achieve this, learners need models of simple sentences that they can vary and embellish to incorporate their own ideas.
Statement of the Problem

Most schools in Brunei Darussalam practice a similar format in composition writing, which is the typical picture composition. The reason for this is because teachers are afraid to try out new approaches as this may upset their teaching procedures and also perhaps because the exam format uses pictures. Although, even after the implementation of the new curriculum, teachers feel that in Negara Brunei Darussalam, the teaching of English is constrained by traditionally based examination. Consequently, teachers feel that by trying other means of writing could afflict the performance of their pupils in the Primary School Assessment (PSR) examination. Despite the new curriculum, which purports to encourage more modern assessment strategies, PSR still relies on picture based story writing in their national assessment.

The problem of rote learning is noted by Larking (1993) in his research in Primary schools in Brunei Darussalam. Larking stated that ‘...for primary 6 children, there was also an emphasis on rote learning a set of essay topics in which they learned the format of a model Essay, so that the Primary Certificate of Education examination (PCE) children could reproduce one of these set pieces as their examination essay.’ (Larking, 1993: p113)

As a result, learners who have the capacity to express themselves in a more creative way are not given encouragement. Thus learners from government schools often rote learn or even memorise their essays in order to achieve good grades, putting aside creativity and the ability to express oneself in a more authentic way. Even as recent as 2007, Az