Page 51 - Jurnal Kurikulum BPK 2020

they are not very committed in preparing appropriate strategies in facing these issues. One
teacher stated that “teachers have so many other things on their plate as teachers that it should
not be their job to be the key role in one student’s heritage language”. Another teacher believed
that the maintanence of Heritage Language should be done by parents at home.
Nero (2006) examines teachers’ attitudes towards non-American and non-British
varieties of English, in particular the use of Caribbean English during English lesson.
Caribbean English has been defined as the English language used in the Caribbean archipelago
and it covers English and Creole. Nero observed that, teachers seem to view students speaking
in fluent Caribbean English were not using “real” English and they “sounded” different than
the teachers’ and assess these students as having English Language deficiency because students
were not able to use the American or British varieties of English. Soliman, Towler and
Snowden (2016) reveal that the teaching of Arabic in UK faces discrimination due to the
association of the Arabic language to the language of Muslims. Wu and Leung (2014) claim
that the teaching of Mandarin as a heritage Language in one of the Multi-racial, multilingual
charter school in a North Eastern United State city is an imposition of identity to the non-
Mandarin Chinese ethnic learners.

METHODOLOGY

The research type adopted for this study is quantitative and a descriptive survey research design
method was employed. The population for this study is KDL Teachers in Penampang district
of Sabah, Malaysia. Data received from Penampang Education Office (2018) states that there
are 21 primary schools offering KDL in the district and the number of teachers teaching from
Year 1 to Year 6 are 70. Samples were selected using the purposive sampling technique. KDL
teachers from the district of Penampang are chosen as the samples for this study because KDL
teachers from this district are teaching pupil whom are not native speakers of the language
variety chosen for KDL teaching and learning. KDL teachers themselves may not even be the
user of KDL as well.
Teachers’ opinions, views and feelings were collected through a questionnaire which
was developed based on Gobana (2013) research instrument for his study on the challenges of
mother-tongue education in Ethiopian primary schools. The constructed questionnaire was
validated by two (2) educators who were well versed in research, curriculum development as
well as teaching and learning fields. The first validator is a lecturer in one of the universities in
Malaysia and she has been involved in the research field for a number of years. The second
validator is the Unit Head of the Research and Evaluation Unit of Curriculum Development
Division, Ministry of Education Malaysia. To determine the reliability of this questionnaire, a
pilot test was conducted and data gained from pilot testing showed that the Cronbach Alpha of
this questionnaire is .916 and Cronbach Alpha based on standardized items is .922. The said
questionnaire consists of three sections. Section 1 is interested in gaining demographic
information of the respondents while Section 2 is concerned in finding out teachers’ perception
of the implementation of KDL. Section three collects information pertaining to issues
encountered by Kadazandusun teachers in the classroom and how the face these issues. 50
questionnaires are responded and returned. The responses were analysed using SPSS and
reported based on frequencies and percentages.

FINDINGS

There were fifty (50) respondents for this study. These respondents were KDL teachers from
the district of Penampang, Sabah, Malaysia. There were sixteen (16) male and thirty-four (34)
female teachers in this study. The majority of respondents were in the age range of forty to
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