Issues in Second Language Curriculum Development: Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei

This paper summarizes current theoretical and practical issues of second language learning and teaching in the national curricula of three countries—Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei Darussalam. One unifying feature of these three countries in ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) is the fact that they are multilingual communities with a vast range of complex linguistic and cultural traditions. A second is that they represent parallel cases of countries in which English has played an internal role historically. A third is that these countries all have Malay as the national language (albeit, in Singapore, with a large Chinese majority and with English as an important working language—Malay is not as widely used). A fourth is that bilingualism is a language policy, whether publicly advocated or implicitly sanctioned.