Literature+review.

“A borderless world”. That what they call the world that we live in today. A .world which have exceeded the boundary of language, religion, belief and the issue of distance. So in such globalized world we need a universal language as a medium to communicate and to display our ideas or thoughts. The English language has served this purpose for decades and most of the countries of the world have acknowledged it as a universal language. Now we are told to make one of our priority to master the English language so that we shall be considered as competitors in the job market in the near future. But today’s graduates find it difficult to master the language. Why it is so?

Graduates today lack the basic foundation of English such as grammar and vocabulary. Even if they know such aspects of English they often fail to apply it in their daily life. This problem does not start when a student enters university but at the early stages of their education. According to the article “ The Mastery of English Language among Lower Secondary Students in Malaysia: Linguistic Analysis” by Nor Hashimah Jalaluddin, Nor Simah Mat Awal, Kesumawati Abu Bakar the problem of lack of mastery over English starts when the students are at their secondary school. This is when students initiate their quest for higher level English. To a student who hasn’t mastered the language at the primary level this may become an uphill task and they tend to find themselves at the back of the pack. This scenario here tend to make them depict English as a though subject to be learned hence help them to think their efforts of mastering English are futile. Finally this attitude of theirs becomes their excuse why they stop improving their English. Based on the same article we are able to discover another reason why it is said mastering English is a very hard thing. The other obstacle which is in the way for a student is their own lack of ability to figure out the syntactical difference between Malay and English. Most of the students first think what they want to say or write in Malay then only they translate it into English. This method often causes them to do more grammatical error and makes them confuse with their sentence structure. This method of theirs they tend to bring along until they reach the university level. So students must be able think in English so that they can get a hold of the grammar and the sentence structure. According to another article written by John Lee “John Lee (2009), Learning English: Serious Business ”  it show that only 25% Malaysians can speak fluent English. This number includes all social groups. So by comparing the graduates groups with the other groups the graduates tend to measure up short with the other groups. This shows how poor are the graduates in their English language skills. This also indicates that they are about to lose in the run for having a bright future and a better job. This article also speaks of the ways of handling this problem such as reading books for building vocabulary, going for extra English classes and using English as a communicating tool in daily basis. Although mastering the english language is important but it is also important to love and nature our national language. This statement can be found in the artical"** English as medium of instruction ** ."by **Abdulrahman Al-Sultan(2009).**    In this artical the author is trying to say that it is important to improve our knowledge of english but it is more important to remember the knowledge of our moter tonuge. It is useless to create or improve other things if we have to sacrife what we have to do so.