Poor English: Publishers should have quality control

There must be quality control by publishers to ensure educational materials are free from spelling, grammatical errors and wrong prepositions.

In making the call, Universiti Sains Malaysia's (USM) School of Humanities dean, Assoc Prof Dr Hajar Abdul Rahim said the Education Ministry should not be blamed for poor English in any publications.

"There must be some quality control by publishers and we cannot blame the ministry only. It is the copy editor of the publisher that must be responsible," she said.

Dr Hajar said this when asked to comment on several science and mathematics workbooks prescribed for Form Three students that were found to be riddled with bad grammar, prepositions and jumbled tenses.

The textbooks were said to have actual questions from the Pentaksiran Tingkatan 3 (PT3) examination test papers that were reprinted with the permission of the Malaysian Examinations Syndicate.

She was speaking to reporters at the Penang English Language Teachers (PELTS 2015) one-day seminar organised by USM, which was officiated by Deputy Education Minister II P. Kamalanathan, here today.

Meanwhile, Kamalanathan said the errors should not happen and the people should be the wiser purchasers and look for reputable publishers that were available in the market.

"We don't give permits to private publishers. There are so many of them and some are doing good jobs. We will continue to reprimand publishers that are not able to do a good job," he said.

Kamalanathan said parents were advised to file complaints if there were books that were not right so that the ministry could monitor because it did not have the right to go to bookstores or printers to check.