Comments on Chinese Language education

Q: What is the government’s message on the debate on Chinese language education?

PM: To put it very simply, we are affirming our bilingualism policy. We have never wavered in this fundamental, but we have to update it and adapt our teaching and our CL system so as to respond to a dynamic situation and a varying range of student abilities and language backgrounds.

This is a very challenging policy, because there is nobody else in the world trying to do this. There are societies which are bilingual, English-French, English-Scandinavian, or English-Dutch, or Cantonese-Mandarin. People learn two similar languages and can master one as your mother-tongue, and the other at almost the same level. But we are trying to do it with English-Chinese. These are two very dis-similar languages and very difficult to master at the same level.

We are in a dynamic situation because the position is changing, and we have been updating our policies progressively. In 1999, I chaired a review which led to the introduction of CL B in secondary schools. Then in 2004, five years ago, MM was personally involved in another review which resulted in further adjustments. And we are now still in the process of implementing those adjustments because when you change education policies, there is a very long tail.

You start now, in a few years you have the syllabus, then you begin with primary one, and by the time the P1 students reach P6, it is many years later.  So the first batch of P6 students who will be taking their PSLE based on the revisions in 2004 is next year. We have not even reached there yet, but already we have to look ahead and ask ourselves what is changing, what trends must we anticipate and how can we adjust? And that is what we are trying to do.

Q:  There is a sense that our approach to bilingualism is wrong?

PM: We have to update it to take account of what has changed in the world and what we have learnt about teaching students two languages.

What has changed in the world? In the last five years, the importance of China to the world and to us has grown and become even more obvious. And the desire of Singaporeans to master Chinese has grown. Nobody any longer asks “What is the point of wasting time on this?”.  Everybody knows that Chinese language is valuable and they want to master it – both the students and the parents, and we have enabled them to do it.  The proportion of students taking Higher Chinese has gone up.  Now, 27% of O-level candidates take HCL, more than double the figure before the last changes were made.

The bicultural programme has been very popular and the students have done well. They spend time in immersion, a few months in China, and this year a few of our PSC OMS Scholars, including a President Scholar, have opted to do their undergraduate degrees in China. So that is a very valuable positive factor. Singaporeans want to learn Chinese, and understand its importance.  We should capitalise on that, and enable students who are good at the language to achieve the maximum for themselves.

At the same time, the population mix in Singapore and the language environment in Singapore are shifting. When I did the CL review in 1999, 43% of the Chinese students in P1 came from English speaking homes.  It is the opposite today. Now 59% of P1 Chinese students come from predominantly English speaking homes. Those coming from the Mandarin speaking homes are the minority.

The home environment makes enormous difference to the child’s language habits and abilities. Whether you are learning Chinese by taking classes a few hours a week or whether you have already learnt Chinese before you came to school and it is a language that you naturally have spoken, the sounds, the words, the expressions, the idioms, the grammar, are all familiar, and in school you are just formalising and building on what you already know, that makes a world of a difference. We have to acknowledge this shift in language habits, and adapt our system so as to make it work for the larger number of English background students.

Thirdly, technology has advanced, even over the last few years. When I was in school, we carried the 字典, we thumbed the dictionary and when you looked up a word or phrase, then you ticked it off. And next time you want to look up a word that you have forgotten, you have to search all over again. Now we have electronic dictionaries, computers for input where you can type hanyu pinyin, translation tools on the Internet and reading tools on the Internet. Take Lianhe Zaobao’s OMY for example, not only can you see the pages but you can click on them and it produces a rendition, it reads to you and it “does-not-sound-like-this” (robotic sounding). It sounds like a real person speaking with natural cadences and rhythms.  It is very high quality.

So from the point of view of somebody reading Chinese or learning Chinese, it is a totally different experience. And from the point of view of somebody working with the language, it is also different. In China now, everybody uses computer inputs one way or other.  The young people are working on keyboards so much that when they have to write the characters, they do not remember how to produce them.  They can recognize it, but to reproduce it – what are the strokes, the sequence, the structure and so on, they may have to look it up.

So the practices are changing and what you write has changed. You may write an SMS, write an email, short messages and that is what you are likely to be reading too. You may read postings on the internet which are very informal and there are all sorts of strange abbreviations. I was exchanging messages with a young person in Chinese and the person typed “3488”. So I asked what on earth is “3488” – “暂时拜拜”.  There are all sorts of other abbreviations and synonyms which have become part of the lingo.  If you stick to the traditional formal language teaching, you are not going to teach people that, you are not going to use that, and students are going to learn a very formal language but that is not what they will often encounter in real life.

So what we teach the students has to be what they will find useful in real life, and the forms which they will need to use in real life.  A small number will have the occasion to write formal compositions, maybe even essays or articles in Chinese. But for the majority, in real life you are more likely to read than to write, and more likely to listen and speak than to read or write. Quite often you will read short pieces rather than dense long passages of prose, and a lot of it will be verbal. I listen to you and reply to you, and I need to be comfortable and fluent doing that.

Given this language environment and new technology, the testing methods ought to go with that and make use of that. So in an exam, you can bring an electronic dictionary along and ideally, everybody should have a keyboard and should type and write on the keyboard rather than have the burden of struggling with the mechanics of memorising and writing characters by hand. So these are all changes which we must take into account to bring ourselves up to date.

The biggest difference is of course the difference in English and Chinese home language backgrounds. We want all students to learn, but the way you teach somebody for whom Chinese is a new language, as opposed to somebody for whom Chinese is already a true mother tongue, cannot be the same.  There is a lot of experience overseas accumulated teaching Chinese to students who are learning it as a 2nd language, usually as an adult. And MOE itself has done some experiments in some schools, using English more to teach kids from English language backgrounds to master Chinese.  So that when you read “苹果”, you already know what an apple is and you just write down “apple”.  Or if you see “民主”, you say democracy.  If you try to explain “民主” in Chinese, then the explanation itself may lead to further explanations of the explanation and in the end you will make it very difficult for the kids to learn.

So how we teach these two groups - we have to develop new skills to teach the English background kids well, and to examine them properly. These are changes we have to make.

I know the Chinese language teachers have a very difficult time because the external environment is changing and domestically we have to adjust our policies, and the teachers have to adjust what and how they teach. I have visited them in schools and seen how hard they are trying – innovatively with role play, with audio-visual skits, with musicals and so on, to get the message across and make pupils interested in learning and using the language.  It is not an easy job at all.

In Lianhe Zaobao’s on Sunday, Lee Huay Leng 李慧玲 wrote that Chinese teachers exemplify the spirit of never say die – 百折不挠.  Exactly. To do this job you must have the passion and you must believe in it – 知其不可而为之者也 – you know that it cannot be done to perfection, but nevertheless you continue to try your best and achieve whatever is possible.

So I take my hat to them but at the same time, we have to help them adapt to the new environment and understand the changes in the society and to equip them with the skills and materials so that they are able to do a good job teaching the changing profile of students.

We cannot go back to where we were in the 1950s and 60s when some of the Lianhe Zaobao readers and I were in school in the 1950s and 60s when we had a completely Chinese language environment.  All the subjects were taught in Chinese, the students conversed among themselves in Mandarin, the system assumed the students already knew the language and the classes were just teaching them to polish up, expand their vocabulary, their understanding of the literature, the idioms, the classical references (典故) to make the student a cultivated, educated Chinese scholar. We are not in that position anymore.

We are trying in an English speaking environment to maintain a level of working proficiency in Chinese and other mother tongues for the whole of the population, but different levels of proficiency depending on the linguistic ability of the person and his language background and his home background. Some can reach almost first language standard and join the bicultural programs.  A majority should have a functional mastery of the language – some from Mandarin speaking homes, some from English speaking homes too, because many students from English speaking homes actually have good language aptitude and quite often do well in Higher Chinese.

But some students from English speaking homes are going to have a lot of difficulties with Chinese, however hard they try. Maybe they are generally weak in school, but not always. The correlation between your language ability and your general academic skills is not that close.  Quite often we come across students who are generally bright and able, but have a lot of difficulties with Chinese. So we have to set standards for this group which are realistic, which they can aim for, but without bringing down standards for everybody else. That is why we introduced CL B.

Therefore, we need a tailored approach which is adapted to the whole range of language backgrounds and abilities. We have to acknowledge that as a reality and make our system work on that basis.

Everybody has to make an effort. It can never be effortless to learn a language well. You cannot just listen to Chinese pop songs having your bath, or watch soap operas and variety shows on TV every evening, and effortlessly become fluent at the language, listening or speaking it. You have to make the effort to memorise some of the words, to learn the grammar and the expressions.  We should push the limits to get our students to go just a little bit further, so that there is always that pressure to do well.  But the effort demanded has to be realistic, reasonable, and commensurate with what the students are able to do, and that level will vary from student to student. 

Q:  So it is not so much an issue of backtracking on our bilingual policy?

PM: There are two groups of instant responses every time we raise the subject of mother tongue. One, from those who hated the subject – there you are, I was right all along, now you have finally admitted that you were wrong. And the other group which says mother tongue is sacrosanct, let us not touch it, do not disturb it, leave it be.

But these perspectives focus on the past.  We are not arguing over the past.  We are trying to deliberate what is the best way forward for the future. We want to succeed at mother tongue because it is critical to Singapore – not just economically but also to our sense of identity and who we are as Singaporeans and as Asians in a globalised world.

But at the same time we must know what we can achieve, and what is the best way of attaining the level that we are aiming for.  And that is what we are trying to do.

MOE is studying these issues now, and will be ready to announce something in the Committee of Supply in Parliament next March.

Q: How then do you persuade someone who is worried that if you keep simplifying the language you would one day lose its integrity?

PM:  We have to decide what is the right thing to do. If you look at the track record over the last few years, the proportion of students taking Higher Chinese has been going up, because the students have been able to do Higher Chinese and are interested to do it.

At the other end, we have students who have considerable difficulty with Chinese and we have made adjustments partly because we have not been teaching them in quite the right way, so we have to adjust our teaching method to be better suited to their backgrounds and how they are able to learn the new language. Partly it is also setting standards which fit that group of people so that you have a range of targets and standards.  That is something which we have to continue to do. We have to try and do what is educationally sound, and pedagogically and academically in the interest of the child.

If you politicise this and ask what is the popular thing to do when teaching Chinese, or for that matter English or Science, then we are going to do a big dis-favour to the child. We have to determine what is educationally sound and is the best way to teach CL within the capabilities of the kids, to interest them in the subject and not to turn them off the language.  And that is what we were trying to achieve.