Insistence on bilingualism in early years of education policy was wrong: MM Lee
By Hoe Yeen Nie, Channel NewsAsia | Posted: 17 November 2009 2142 hrs

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SINGAPORE: Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said his insistence on bilingualism in the early years of education policy was "wrong". Instead it caused generations of students to be put off by the Chinese language.

Speaking first in Mandarin and then in English at the official opening of the Singapore Centre for Chinese Language on Tuesday, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew gave a blunt assessment of Singapore's bilingual policy.

He said: "We started the wrong way. We insisted on ting xie (listening), mo xie (dictation) - madness! We had teachers who were teaching in completely-Chinese schools. And they did not want to use any English to teach English-speaking children Chinese and that turned them off completely."

Mr Lee added: "At first I thought, you can master two languages. Maybe different intelligence, you master it at different levels."

But his conclusions now, after over 40 years of learning Mandarin, cannot be more different.

MM Lee said: "Nobody can master two languages at the same level. If (you think) you can, you're deceiving yourself. My daughter is a neurologist, and late in my life she told me language ability and intelligence are two different things.

"Girls are better at languages because their left side of the brain to learn languages, as a general rule, is better than the boys. Boys have great difficulty, and I had great difficulty.

"Successive generations of students paid a heavy price, because of my ignorance, by my insistence on bilingualism. And I wasn't helped by the ministry officials, because there were two groups - one English speaking, one Chinese teaching."

Mr Lee said educators should first get the child interested in the language by focusing on the way it is heard and spoken. This includes incorporating drama and IT into lessons to make them more engaging.

Mr Lee said: "It doesn't matter what level they reach, they will like the language, it's fun, and later on in life they'll use it."

The need to make the Chinese language more appealing to students has been a focus of the Education Ministry in recent years and one way is to re-examine how the language is taught in schools.

So the new centre set up in February to train Chinese language teachers will soon offer degree programmes that include modules on curriculum design and teaching methods.

The programmes will be offered under four agreements that were formalised on Tuesday. They include a part-time degree for preschool teachers under a partnership with the SEED Institute, a training institute for early childhood educators.

Tan Chee Lay, deputy executive director, Singapore Centre for Chinese Language, said: "For students to learn, the golden age is from three to six. So in this period of time, if we're able to teach them well, they'll learn well and their language foundation will be there."

Other partners are the Media Development Authority (MDA), SIM University (UniSIM), and the University of Hong Kong.

There are over 4,000 Chinese-language teachers here and about a quarter of them have been trained by the centre so far. - CNA/vm