RIYADH: An education official has said that the solution to Saudis' lack of proficiency in the English is not to cut teaching the subject but to begin instruction from the very earliest levels of education. Abdullah Al-Muqbil, a former education policy official at the Ministry of Education, made the remarks in response to a member of the Shoura Council who said recently that the teaching of the language should only be introduced at secondary school level due to the shortage of teachers. “The way to approach the problem is quite the opposite,” Al-Muqbil told Al-Hayat Arabic daily. “We should encourage the teaching of English more and review the curriculum as a whole and improve the standard of teachers, that's the way to improve the situation.” He added that the shortage of teachers was restricted to males. “There are sufficient numbers of women English language teachers for girls,” Muqbil said. “But that should not stop us teaching English at primary school. It also gives us the opportunity to offer positions of employment to young Saudis.” Shoura Council member Ahmad Aal Mufrih had proposed suspending English language classes at secondary schools and canceling them altogether at primary and intermediary schools, describing them as a “waste of money and human resources”. Muqbil said, however, that if the issue was the poor standard of teaching then by the same logic “all subjects could be canceled”. “We should be teaching English from the very first grade of primary school,” he said. “The Ministry of Education decided to teach it at primary school, a move that had its supporters and its opposition, and in they end they settled on teaching it from sixth grade primary school, but then decided from the fifth, then the fourth… and then it stopped at the sixth, due to a staff shortage.” Aal Mufrih had backed up his proposals by saying that he himself was an English teacher and extremely interested in the teaching of the subject.
