Often in Malaysia, people talk about how our standard of English is either sufficiently good that it is the basis of a thesis for investment, or they say that our English is abysmal and needs drastically to be improved – discussions go on and on, and people fight, oftentimes in what seems like a battle for the soul of our society. But what does it mean, actually, that our English is good or our English is bad? Some say that Malaysia aligns itself to international standards in creating its curricula, but others squabble day in and day out, constantly complaining about the quality of English amongst graduates who come into the workforce, observing that many of them lack basic skills that they would expect graduates to have. How can it be possible that Malaysia calibrates itself to international standards while at the same time its graduates languish in terms of their English language proficiency? But at the end of the day, who’s right?  As it turns out, investigating a little further tells us that the answer is both. Here’s where the subject of our blog post for today comes in: The Common European Framework for Reference, otherwise known as the CEFR.  The reason that I’m making this comparison today and telling you about CEFR is that Malaysia uses it to calibrate SPM writing standards.  The CEFR operationalizes language proficiency in accordance with six dimensions, from A1 up until C2. It is an international standard that is utilized by examining bodies across the world in order to designate proficiency levels and descriptors that students attain after courses of study, and it is used also in designing curricula so that students can reach a certain defined standard. Source: https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/Images/126130-cefr-diagram.pdf CEFR operationalizes English proficiency according to numerous level descriptors, providing explanations of what a user of the English language should be able to do […]

Picture this. You’ve written a post that you want to share on social media, or you’ve made a video somehow or another. You’re sitting there on the edge of your chair, just about to click post, but you look at what you’ve written, what you’ve made, you notice that final error, you question yourself, thinking about the manifold ways in which people could be judging you silently and from afar, contemplating in your mind’s eye the dialogues that must be taking place. “Oh my gosh, this person wrote this?” “Oh my gosh. Did he really make that grammatical error?” “Wow, this is boring. Why am I even watching?”“How could he make such a video?” And so the thoughts come out, percolate like coffee through filter paper, and eventually crystallize into little gems of self-doubt, blocking the nervous signal that would have caused you to click. You turn away from your plan, and you declare:”Maybe later, but not now.” Before you know it, the entire project is abandoned. If you’re anything like me, you may have faced this, this feeling of wanting to do something, but realizing, or at least thinking that you weren’t good enough, that the manifold imperfections that existed in you would come out, and that people would judge you one way or another. Well, here’s a fact, though. People certainly will judge you. I mean, how could they not? Everyone encounters something as a first glance, thinks about it, and evaluates it on their own terms. That’s just how it is. The judgment will happen. There is absolutely nothing that you can do about it, and your feeling certainly is right. The thing is though, that even though it is right, this isn’t a valid reason to run away. Because truly, the only way to get past it is to face your fears, to accept judgements as they […]

Once in a while, a technology comes along that just completely transforms the way that we think, we live, and we experience the entire world.  ​​Certainly the entire world has been captivated by the rise of AI in recent days – how could it not, when millions of influencers around the world endeavor on a day to day basis to showcase the 500th AI tool that you ABSOLUTELY NEED TO USE on a day to day basis? Well, I don’t know much about technologies beyond ChatGPT, to be honest, but there is definitely one thing that has come out from it, which is probably the feature that I use the very most out of pretty much everything on the planet, and that is automated speech recognition, specifically, the OpenAI ChatGPT Whisper ASR Recognition System. Automated speech recognition is how I’m communicating everything here to you. It is how I’m putting down my thoughts, word by word, by simply sitting down next to this open door on a rainy morning, narrating out the story as if I were talking to you.  The Automated Speech Recognition Algorithm, which is in this case the ChatGPT Whisper app, is transcribing everything that I’m saying with an almost perfect accuracy, but perhaps with some small issues with punctuation that I will fix after the fact. It is incredible, tremendously accurate, and something that I could have never imagined just three to four months ago. As a result of this technology, as you read, you’re actually listening, in a sense, to what I said on that morning when the air was cool and the rain was falling, it was 7.49am in the morning, and 48 seconds had passed on the clock.  As I narrated these words then, eventually, the clock turned to 7.50, indicating a shift in time.  I made a mental note to myself at that […]