Abstract:
The Malaysian Ministry of Education has implemented the use of English as the
medium of instruction at primary school level beginning 2003. These students are
the main group of people affected by this change in policy. Besides, the
implementation of the approach also raises the readiness of students in the rural
areas. Therefore, the aims of the study are a) comparing between year 1 students
from the urban and the rural areas in terms of their competency of science process
skills which use English terminologies, and b) determining the level of readiness
of year 1 students in learning the science process skills in English for Science
subject. The study adopted a quantitative research method design to make a
comparison between Year 1 students in the rural and urban areas and to determine
the level of readiness. The research findings show that there is a significant
difference between year 1 students in rural and urban in term of communication
skill, classification skill and observation skill. The findings from this study could
contribute to the improvement of pedagogical practices in teaching Science in
primary school.
