Educationists, teachers, parents, as well as all adult members of the community have to bear in mind that all children do not grow up with similar ability of mind and body. Among the pupils at school, not all are endowed with the same or near same intellectual capacity to understand and learn. There is a diversity and wide range of ability among pupils in class. At present, the style of teaching reflects the prevalent belief that all pupils can follow and understand correctly what is being conveyed to them. But alas! This is not the case. We have to appreciate that some pupils are slower at learning or are what we term ?at risk? children. Others understand ?wrongly? i.e. their sense of perception may not be correct. It is these children who lag behind and can never keep up with the classroom trend. Once they lose their bearings, they backslide into further weaknesses and become, in the course of time, completely unmotivated; they thus ?abandon? and lose interest in all classroom activities. Not that these children lack the ability to learn, it is rather that their pace of assimilation is either distorted or slower than the norm. In addition to this situation, our primary school system does not provide any form of educational help to try to retrieve them.

The solution to this undesirable situation may not necessarily lie in the abolition of automatic promotion, or the use of alternative media of instruction. One can foresee a backlog of referred candidates, should automatic promotion be abolished, and ?a Standard Literacy and Numeracy Test? be introduced at the Standard III primary school level. The question that arises is what to do with those referred candidates? Is repeating a class going at all to help them improve their subsequent performance? What if those referred pupils are referred once more the following year? Do we take their chronological age into consideration? At the Certificate of Primary Education (CPE) level we sure will find a lot of ?over-age? young adolescents at a far advanced puberty age that can lead to other serious problems. However, it is not the intention of this article to dwell on at this point.

There is no provision at all to cater for referred pupils at Standard III level if the examination is implemented. It is so very easy to ?dump? them to repeat Standard III again. It is simple common sense to guess the nature of the problem to be expected. The referred pupils can only be ?disruptive elements? for the others in class. Most pupils who have been referred, will follow classes of the Norm Reference Approach type mentioned in my previous article. Knowledge being always linked in a chain of progressive teaching, those pupils who fail at the proposed selective test will never make it.

The solution to preventing failure in the CPE lies elsewhere. To start with, improvement in pupils? performance can only hopefully be seen after years of alternative educational approaches, rather than through the compiling of the examination results of the very year following a proposed reform. Firstly, let?s see how we can produce teachers with expertise in how to retrieve those pupils whose performance is not up to standard. It goes without saying that some pupils within the main stream need special help. All teachers should be conversant with ?the art of giving individual help?, to special needs pupils throughout the year in all primary school classes. After retrieval the pupil can then join his/her usual class. It is only then that the pupil can get back to the ?right track? of classroom teaching and learning. This situation dictates that teachers should acquire, during their training period, the capacity to understand and provide for ?weaker? pupils with special needs. At school also, additional infrastructure should be provided for such special teaching activity to take place. Mature practising teachers should also be provided with ongoing additional training to enable them to provide for children at risk. Recent updated reading materials can also be used by teachers who should have easy access to them in established regional libraries, or better still, at their own place of work.

<B>The use of profiling</B>

The use of profiling for each pupil is also essential. This takes the form of a folder (dossier) for each child that includes, among others, his ability, weaknesses, familial background, health, classroom progress, etc. throughout the primary school period. This will then enable the teachers to know the pupils? level of ability and thus intervene accordingly.

<B>The mother tongue myth</B>

This is another issue that causes us to ponder over the medium or media of instruction for the promotion of pupils? progress at school. There was a UNESCO recommendation way back in 1953 that stipulated the desirability of using the vernacular or mother tongue in education. But then, according to subsequent educationists, including Noah Chomsky who proposed that each child possesses an innate language acquisition device (LAD), the child does have the infinite capacity to simultaneously learn several languages. It is reasonable to appreciate that some are of the opinion that we cannot teach an unknown through another unknown. That is, that we cannot teach a subject by using a medium of instruction foreign to the learner.

Yet, I would rather prefer to side with the opinion that a child possesses the infinite capacity to learn a multiplicity of languages. I am convinced that, if handled carefully, a teacher can teach in media starting from the mother tongue, and mixing it with international languages, be they English or French. I also believe that the child from age zero to seven or eight years can handle several languages simultaneously, if the teacher possesses the ability to handle the situation carefully and professionally, as mentioned above. A kind of ?repetitive oral translation approach? can be used to help, since the children do possess the ability and the required sensitivity at this early age (LAD). I am favouring this last approach to help us avoid falling into the ghetto of isolation. The more languages we learn through a constant ?hammering? of both mother tongue and foreign languages, whether as media or as languages per se, can only be beneficial to the children in whose infinite capacity we must trust. I can take the risk of mentioning that it is not the foreign language(s) issue that is necessarily resulting in failures of primary school children. It is rather the mishandling of the foreign languages that is the main cause. We can take another opportunity to explain the meaning of mishandling in this context and propose a strategic solution. Practical research may have to be devised regarding this last issue.

<B>Andre WAN CHOW WAH</B> Associate Professor</I>