Long regarded as the crux of Singapore’s financial, political and national success, the bilingualism policy has come under the limelight recently, all thanks to Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s apology for his mistakes in the policy.
When the policy was meted out four decades ago, Mr Lee said: “if we were monolingual in our mother tongues, we would not make a living.”
Nobody can deny the fact that as a result of learning our sciences and mathematics in English, we can go almost anywhere to further our education and earn a living as a scientist or a lawyer. MNCs and research companies have no qualms about setting up regional bases here and directly contributing to our economy. However a further prognosis of Mr Lee did not quite materialize. He predicted that ”Becoming monolingual in English would have been a setback.
We would have lost our cultural identity, that quiet confidence about ourselves and our place in the world.” Regrettably, the younger generation has already shown signs of that much unwanted setback despite NOT being monolingual. We might, with some difficulty, claim to be bilingual but we are definitely not bicultural. The younger generation has lost interest in the Chinese language because of the way Chinese is taught in schools: rigid, boring and meaningless. Chinese literature and culture are out of the question if students loathe the medium of instruction. It is hardly perplexing that most of us know nothing about cultural heritage and identity.
What might be happening? A fundamental principle of our governance is that education keeps up with economic growth and society. Consequentially, we learn a language if it is beneficial to the country, regardless of personal interest. For instance, we learn mother tongue to promote communication and economic cooperation with other countries.
The Chinese language is emphasized in particular because the government wants Singaporeans to leverage on the rapid growth of China. The problem occurs when the pressure on students comes in the form of ‘forced’ learning of the written and spoken forms of Chinese over a short period of time in order to ‘keep up with the economy’. Our ‘comprehensive’ Chinese education lasts from primary school to pre-university education (JC/polytechnic), after which hardly anyone reads or writes Chinese anymore. At best, we use a mixture of Chinese and English in our daily conversations in addition to losing almost all writing and reading skills. Is this the kind of attitude and level of Chinese literacy desirable in a population expected to deal with native speakers of Chinese?
It would be exaggerated to claim that we are all jaded victims of the bilingualism policy, for I consider myself a relatively grateful survivor of the policy. I enjoy speaking and writing Chinese and it still surprises me how some of my peers abhor the language.
Learning Chinese was not enjoyable because one had to go through the rites of dictation and ‘ting xie’ year after year. It was a chore, a pain, but it gradually became bearable as I was moulded by being around Chinese-speaking friends and grew to like Chinese music and Taiwanese entertainment shows. These seem like trivial and silly reasons but they all point to the fact that to learn Chinese, one has to enjoy the process. Make it ‘fun’, as Mr Lee Kuan Yew puts. However, learning Chinese should not be achieved by removing the arduous process of ‘ting xie’ and ‘mo xie’ (it’s not madness, really.) Instead, the focus should lie on inculcating interest in the language out of a school setting.
Family and friends play an important role in shaping one’s attitude towards the language. For example, it helps that families try to speak Chinese at home to help students habituate into speaking mandarin. It is not easy to create a whole new environment around the student, one that facilitates enjoyable learning of the language, but learning a new language is not meant to be effortless.
The top PSLE student this year came from Guangzhou in 2006 and began learning English here. She attributed her success to ‘library trips and encouragement from family and friends to speak English’. Furthermore, she admits that there were no short-cuts to learning a language. Her achievement proved that language learning is hard work; lowering standards or removing burdensome procedures of writing do not solve the problem. I also caution against excessive use of English in teaching Chinese because the two languages are very different in nature and by using English, we are conveying the message that there are ‘equivalents’ in Chinese for everything in English and vice versa.
They all sound more like restrictions than advice to learning a new language. Well, not every individual has a flair for language learning and we have all come to realize that some people are more bilingual than others. Apart from the dearth of a conducive environment for learning Chinese, more commonly there is a lack of motivation. It is impressive to read about people who push themselves to the limit to learn 8 or more languages, all out of passion, but it is idealistic to expect such ardor in our students. Why not separate students into groups of ‘I love Chinese’ and ‘I just want to get it over and done with’? It would be nice to reward passionate learners with the chance to learn more and guarantee release for the uninterested after imparting the most essential ‘knowledge’.
We need to replace the image that Chinese is just another subject one has to mindlessly memorize for twelve years before throwing it away with a precious gift of heritage. For the few who have suffered under the bilingualism policy such that their talents went unrecognized and emigration was the only way out, it is sad to see them forsake valuable cultural assets for the development of their limitless aptitude.
In the earlier years of Singapore’s independence, the situation was reverse. There was a greater proportion of mandarin-speaking families and we were figuring out ways of better grasping the English language. How did we become better at English over the years? Encouraging families to communicate more in English and gradually shifting from Chinese-medium schools to English-medium schools were some contributing factors. As much as these changes improved our English, they reduced Chinese and other mother tongues to mere subjects like mathematics. Could there be a similar reversal in favour of the Chinese language? Bilingualism was borne out of Singapore’s need to operate globally and ‘retain’ cultural identity; it is time we put more effort into its second objective.
When the policy was meted out four decades ago, Mr Lee said: “if we were monolingual in our mother tongues, we would not make a living.”
Nobody can deny the fact that as a result of learning our sciences and mathematics in English, we can go almost anywhere to further our education and earn a living as a scientist or a lawyer. MNCs and research companies have no qualms about setting up regional bases here and directly contributing to our economy. However a further prognosis of Mr Lee did not quite materialize. He predicted that ”Becoming monolingual in English would have been a setback.
We would have lost our cultural identity, that quiet confidence about ourselves and our place in the world.” Regrettably, the younger generation has already shown signs of that much unwanted setback despite NOT being monolingual. We might, with some difficulty, claim to be bilingual but we are definitely not bicultural. The younger generation has lost interest in the Chinese language because of the way Chinese is taught in schools: rigid, boring and meaningless. Chinese literature and culture are out of the question if students loathe the medium of instruction. It is hardly perplexing that most of us know nothing about cultural heritage and identity.
What might be happening? A fundamental principle of our governance is that education keeps up with economic growth and society. Consequentially, we learn a language if it is beneficial to the country, regardless of personal interest. For instance, we learn mother tongue to promote communication and economic cooperation with other countries.
The Chinese language is emphasized in particular because the government wants Singaporeans to leverage on the rapid growth of China. The problem occurs when the pressure on students comes in the form of ‘forced’ learning of the written and spoken forms of Chinese over a short period of time in order to ‘keep up with the economy’. Our ‘comprehensive’ Chinese education lasts from primary school to pre-university education (JC/polytechnic), after which hardly anyone reads or writes Chinese anymore. At best, we use a mixture of Chinese and English in our daily conversations in addition to losing almost all writing and reading skills. Is this the kind of attitude and level of Chinese literacy desirable in a population expected to deal with native speakers of Chinese?
It would be exaggerated to claim that we are all jaded victims of the bilingualism policy, for I consider myself a relatively grateful survivor of the policy. I enjoy speaking and writing Chinese and it still surprises me how some of my peers abhor the language.
Learning Chinese was not enjoyable because one had to go through the rites of dictation and ‘ting xie’ year after year. It was a chore, a pain, but it gradually became bearable as I was moulded by being around Chinese-speaking friends and grew to like Chinese music and Taiwanese entertainment shows. These seem like trivial and silly reasons but they all point to the fact that to learn Chinese, one has to enjoy the process. Make it ‘fun’, as Mr Lee Kuan Yew puts. However, learning Chinese should not be achieved by removing the arduous process of ‘ting xie’ and ‘mo xie’ (it’s not madness, really.) Instead, the focus should lie on inculcating interest in the language out of a school setting.
Family and friends play an important role in shaping one’s attitude towards the language. For example, it helps that families try to speak Chinese at home to help students habituate into speaking mandarin. It is not easy to create a whole new environment around the student, one that facilitates enjoyable learning of the language, but learning a new language is not meant to be effortless.
The top PSLE student this year came from Guangzhou in 2006 and began learning English here. She attributed her success to ‘library trips and encouragement from family and friends to speak English’. Furthermore, she admits that there were no short-cuts to learning a language. Her achievement proved that language learning is hard work; lowering standards or removing burdensome procedures of writing do not solve the problem. I also caution against excessive use of English in teaching Chinese because the two languages are very different in nature and by using English, we are conveying the message that there are ‘equivalents’ in Chinese for everything in English and vice versa.
They all sound more like restrictions than advice to learning a new language. Well, not every individual has a flair for language learning and we have all come to realize that some people are more bilingual than others. Apart from the dearth of a conducive environment for learning Chinese, more commonly there is a lack of motivation. It is impressive to read about people who push themselves to the limit to learn 8 or more languages, all out of passion, but it is idealistic to expect such ardor in our students. Why not separate students into groups of ‘I love Chinese’ and ‘I just want to get it over and done with’? It would be nice to reward passionate learners with the chance to learn more and guarantee release for the uninterested after imparting the most essential ‘knowledge’.
We need to replace the image that Chinese is just another subject one has to mindlessly memorize for twelve years before throwing it away with a precious gift of heritage. For the few who have suffered under the bilingualism policy such that their talents went unrecognized and emigration was the only way out, it is sad to see them forsake valuable cultural assets for the development of their limitless aptitude.
In the earlier years of Singapore’s independence, the situation was reverse. There was a greater proportion of mandarin-speaking families and we were figuring out ways of better grasping the English language. How did we become better at English over the years? Encouraging families to communicate more in English and gradually shifting from Chinese-medium schools to English-medium schools were some contributing factors. As much as these changes improved our English, they reduced Chinese and other mother tongues to mere subjects like mathematics. Could there be a similar reversal in favour of the Chinese language? Bilingualism was borne out of Singapore’s need to operate globally and ‘retain’ cultural identity; it is time we put more effort into its second objective.
