Reader: Sabah, Land Below The Wind

The Reader is made up of 52 pages of 40 titles of linear (written text) and non-linear (picture/illustration/graphic image) reading material. It is in full colour print and has a glossy magazine-like quality that makes it a very different school “textbook” from all the English Language textbooks that have come before it in the Malaysian school curriculum. The images that complement the texts are interesting and help steer students to a better understanding of the texts. Images are laid out in ways similar to the current web pages on the Internet. Overall, the Reader constantly draws attention to the life around us, bringing the outside world into the classroom.

This Reader, as well as, its corresponding workbooks denoting various English Language Skills was produced for a number of reasons:

Authentic Material

Students in schools needed reading material that is current, genuine and relevant, not contrived work, to enable them to understand that the need to learn English is to connect them to the real world outside. English is the bridge from schooling to a job in real life when they have finished their education and it is time to be productive human beings. From linear to non-linear, each page is an example of what is happening outside the classroom.

Syllabus-based

The Reader consists of pages that are relevant to the Malaysian English Language syllabus. Each page has more than one syllabus item that can be exploited to meet the needs of a teacher rushing to finish the year’s syllabus in English. While there may not be multiples of a syllabus item, it does however; introduce the topics in the English Language syllabus, paving the way for other lessons on the topic for the English teacher.

Various levels of difficulty

The Reader has pages ranging from extremely easy to manage, to rather challenging. It allows the student to track his/her progression of learning from easy to most difficult at his/her own pace. Struggling readers can start with non-linear pages and move onto longer reading texts with each successive page and gather confidence as they progress through the book.

Sabah Centric

Sabah is the focus of most of the texts and illustrations of the Reader. Students in rural and remote areas need a more tangible form of learning material compared to urban students who had access to computers and wifi, and television or videos. Struggling readers need to associate with something that they are familiar with to a certain extent so that they can move onto areas that they are not familiar with. While students in Sabah have the advantage of learning about their own state which is in fact, a very big state that Sabahan school students are not knowledgeable about, students in other states of Malaysia learn about a part of Malaysia that is little known to them, thus uniting the two – East and West Malaysia, as one Malaysia.