Some insights from English language classrooms at four Agama Rakyat Schools in the State of Perak

Abstract

This article presents some qualitative findings extracted from a larger scale research on how English is taught at few Agama Rakyat schools (SAR) in Perak. Four English language teachers; Teacher A, B, C and D, teaching at four different SAR schools were interviewed. An in-depth, semi-structured interview questions were developed as a mean to gather data. The excerpts from the interview sessions reveal that all the teacher participants are not certified as English as a Second Language practitioners and rarely attend professional development courses. As a result, not only they lack in the basic of teacher teaching knowledge, the schools financial constraints also has led to the classrooms not having enough IT facilities to assist their teaching. Despite all the teachers show their deep interest and passion to teach English language, the constraints and challenges faced by them have somehow deter them from demonstrating their best teaching competence. We hope that these preliminary observations from our study will lead to more research efforts in order to understand the realities and complexities of teaching English language at the Agama Rakyat schools in Malaysia.