Asia Foundation to ship 19,000 English books to Sarawak

Sarawakians, especially children in the rural areas, will have access to thousands of brand new latest edition English books every year, in support of the state government's initiative to adopt English as second official language. Under the Asia for Books programme, the Asia Foundation will continue to bring in brand new books from the United States, at least twice a year, following the success of the pilot shipment of some 19,000 books arriving in March. "We want to see people get excited (with this programme), we don't want to see flooding of these new books but not been touched," Herizal Hazri, the Asia Foundation Malaysia representative told The Malaysian Insider. "We thought this programme can fall quite nicely within the state government's initiative. But, policy is policy, it needs to be realised by people, if people don't like it, and that's no point doing it." Herizal said the state government's initiative on the use of English as the second official language was a "helpful and healthy" policy. "It is healthy to have society able to converse in more than one language and English as the global and economic language, it is even more helpful." However, he said Malaysians needed to look at the policy practically and objectively, and obviously not to politicise it. "Often when people say this kind of thing, it gets politicised the very second they say it, which is not helpful as we are trying to bring on an important issue for development of knowledge." The programme, with partner Yayasan Sarawak, was launched by Chief Minister Tan Sri Adenan Satem, who is also the foundation chairman, on Monday. The Asia Foundation will bear the shipping cost to bring in all the materials from San Francisco while Yayasan Sarawak will bear the cost of storing the books and distributing them. University of Malaysia will monitor and evaluate the programme. About 70% of the books is on early education, and the rest on middle and higher learning, covering a wide variety of subjects. Herizal said subsequent shipment of books would depend on the distribution of the first batch of books and on the feedback on the programme. "We can't really force… if people in Sarawak feel this programme is not that important, we probably won't continue, because it is not cheap." The primary objective is to make brand new materials available to the people, and thereby encouraging the people to use the book, such as reading, competition, design a project, in a bid to inculcate reading, empowering knowledge and increase English proficiency. – February 20, 2016.]]>