Bilingual Education Revisited: The Role of Ugama Schools in the Spread of Bilingualism
This chapter considers the role of Islamic religious schools or Ugama schools (ugama lit. ‘religion’ ) in the development of bilingualism and bilingual education in Brunei Darussalam. Brunei’s bilingual mainstream education system has long been the subjec
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Bilingual Education Revisited: The Role of Ugama Schools in the Spread of Bilingualism Noor Azam Haji-Othman
16.1
Introduction
This chapter considers the role of Islamic religious schools or Ugama schools (ugama lit. ‘religion’) in the development of bilingualism and bilingual education in Brunei Darussalam. Brunei’s bilingual mainstream education system has long been the subject of studies which often, rightly to some extent, identify it to be the primary reason for Bruneians’ widespread bilingualism in English and Malay. In particular the focus has been on the Dwibahasa (‘two-language’) system that was introduced in 1985 (replacing the dual Malay stream and English stream schools system) and ran until 2009, when it was then replaced by the 21st Century National Education System (SPN21), which was in fact not too dissimilar from its predecessor. Bruneian students mainly attend mainstream schools in the morning from 7.30 am to 12.30 pm. However, for the Malay Muslim majority population of Brunei, many actually concurrently attend an Islamic (‘Ugama’) school in the afternoon from 1.30 pm to 5 pm for at least 7 years, mainly in their formative and primary years of development. Most works published on bilingualism in Brunei have tended to study the mainstream education systems only (Dual-Stream, Dwibahasa and SPN21), because these are the comprehensive systems that all Bruneians must go through. Although some make reference to Ugama schools, these are often fleeting, and Ugama schools seem to be regarded as peripheral to the subject of English-Malay bilingualism in Brunei. In fact, Ugama schools are usually assumed to be linked to Arabic language development, which is not necessarily the case. The following discussion argue that the comprehensive curricula of the mainstream education provide mainly the English language input, and in fact relatively little Malay input to Bruneians’ bilinguality. It will be argued that in fact the Noor Azam Haji-Othman (&) FASS/UBD, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Jalan Tungku Link, Gadong BE1410, Brunei Darussalam e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 Noor Azam Haji-Othman et al. (eds.), The Use and Status of Language in Brunei Darussalam, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0853-5_16
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Ugama schools, which teach entirely in Malay language and in Jawi (Arabic) script, actually provide most of the Malay input for a Malay-English bilingual Bruneian, and that it is time the roles that Ugama schools play are given due credit. This chapter asks whether critics of Dwibahasa were right all along.
16.2
Bilingual Education in Brunei
The CfBT Report written by Rigall (2014) which analysed the bilingual education policy concludes that three central features have contributed to Brunei’s ability to manage its bilingual policy effectively. According to Rigall, the first feature is Brunei’s continued commitment to a bilingual education policy amidst early external pressures. The second central feature in the development of mastery of tw
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