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SINGAPORE: The Singapore Centre for Chinese Language (SCCL) will start operating from mid-2009. It plans to help at least 1,000 existing Chinese teachers in the country design better language lessons in its first year.
55 per cent of this year's Primary 1 cohort came from English-speaking homes, according to a survey by the Ministry of Education. This is a big jump from a mere 20 per cent a decade ago.
Experts said this is the result of a successful bilingual education system. So the focus of the country's first Chinese language centre will be to create teaching methods to help English-speaking students learn Chinese.
Dr Chin Chee Kuen, executive director, SCCL, said: "After they enter school, the teacher must be able to enhance their speaking and listening skills before they start to teach them reading and writing."
Heng Meng Tee, head of department, Chinese language, Raffles Girls’ Primary School, said: "In terms of research, teachers actually need a lot of resources and help in terms of professional development.
"So with such a centre, we will be getting better support for teachers to come together to work on some research and do a better job in the professional development."
And this could be done with the help of information technology.
Dr Chin added: "If we can have some sort of a learning portal whereby the student can have dialogues with the machine, the system can analyse what are their problems and how these problems can be solved based on the in-time training. So the pupil will be able to know his performance and how he can learn outside school hours."
Grace Fu, Senior Minister of State, Education & National Development, and advisor to the SCCL's Board of Directors, said: "The centre will look into the use of new technology or software in the teaching of Chinese.
"There's a lot of interest world wide on the teaching of Chinese, especially to non-Chinese native speaking families and children, so this is one area that we hope to be a regional hub."
These courses will be funded by the Education Ministry as part of further professional development for teachers. This will be in addition to the pre-service training and certification programmes teachers currently undergo.
Also on the cards are training programmes for pre-school teachers and overseas Chinese teachers.
The centre will be located at the former Ghim Moh Primary School for the first three years.
While most of the recruitment details are in the drawing board stages, the centre plans to tap on the expertise of current teachers' trainers and in the future, invite overseas visiting professors and Masters degree students to join in.
Recruitment is expected to start later this year. - CNA/vm
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