21 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3 Next >>
QiuJP
Triglot
Senior Member
Singapore
Joined 5857 days ago
428 posts - 597 votes 
Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French
Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese
| Message 1 of 21 28 March 2015 at 8:08am | IP Logged |
The first Prime Minister of Singapore has passed away on 23 March 2015. There is now a
lot of documentaries about his contributions to Singapore. One of the policies
mentioned is the Bilingual policy.
During a interview, he mentioned some of the difficulties of implementing a Bilingual
policy. Here is the link and quotes from the interview:
Article
Quote:
INTELLIGENCE does not necessarily translate into a flair for languages.
That was the lesson Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said he learnt in implementing the
bilingual policy in schools.
'Initially, I believed that intelligence was equated to language ability. Later, I
found that they are two different attributes - IQ and a facility for languages. My
daughter, a neurologist, confirmed this,' he said in an interview carried in Petir,
the People's Action Party magazine.
Asked to pick policies he would have implemented differently, he cited the teaching of
bilingualism, especially in English and Mandarin, as the most difficult policy.
'I did not know how difficult it was for a child from an English-speaking home to
learn Mandarin,' he said.
'If you are speaking English at home and you are taught Mandarin in Primary 1 by
Chinese teachers who teach Mandarin as it was taught in the former Chinese schools, by
the direct method, using only Mandarin, you will soon lose interest because you do not
understand what the teacher is saying.
'You spend time on extra tuition, and still make little progress. Many were turned off
Mandarin for life.'
In the end, the Government recognised that students with the same ability in other
subjects may not be able to cope being in the same second language class. It took 30
years for the issue to be resolved.
'Eventually, we settled the problem in 2004 by teaching the mother tongue in the
module system. Had we done this earlier, we would have had less wastage of students'
time and effort, and less heartache for parents,' he said candidly. |
|
|
Edited by Iversen on 28 March 2015 at 11:02am
1 person has voted this message useful
| QiuJP
Triglot
Senior Member
Singapore
Joined 5857 days ago
428 posts - 597 votes
Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French
Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese
| Message 2 of 21 28 March 2015 at 8:12am | IP Logged |
Here is the background on Singapore's bilingual policy. This article highlights the
social, cultural and economical reasons for implementing this policy:
Article
Quote:
BILINGUALISM
"Start off from where we were, let us say after the war, 1945, or even 1965. We were
in different communal groups - Malay kampungs, Chinese villages. You would see
Hainanese at Lorong Tai Seng, Malays in Kampong Ubi, and so on.
(My Old Guard colleague) Mr (S.) Rajaratnam was the exponent of "we can create a race
of Singaporeans". Idealistically, I would go along with him. But, realistically, I
knew it was going to be one long, hard slog; maybe we'll never get there, but we
should try.
Ask yourself this question. If your child brings back a boyfriend or a girlfriend of a
different race, will you be delighted? I will answer you frankly. I do not think I
will. I may eventually accept it. So it is deep in the psyche of a human being.
Before we entered Malaysia when we negotiated the terms of entry, education, language
and culture were such important subjects... Right from the start, education was
already a red-hot issue.
What did we do as a Government? From 1959 to 1965, we had a laissez-faire policy. We
inherited from the British, English schools, Malay schools, Tamil schools and other
schools.
When we became independent in 1965, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce committee came to
see me in my office, then at City Hall. They urged me to have Chinese as our national
and official language. I looked them in the eye and said, "You must be mad, and I
don't want to hear any more of that from you. If you do, you are entering the
political arena. I have to fight you. Because Singapore will come apart."
Supposing I had been otherwise inclined, which my colleagues would not have allowed,
and had said, "Yes, okay." What would have happened to Singapore? Where would the
Malays be, and the Indians, what future would they have? The English-educated Chinese
would also be against us. The country would fall apart.
Let us assume that we were all Chinese, no Malays, no Indians. Could we make a living
with Chinese as our language of government and our national language? Who is going to
trade with us? What do we do? How do we get access to knowledge? There was no choice.
Having made English the working language of government and administration, what do we
do about the mother tongues? If we had no set policy and allowed free market
practices, free choice, all mother tongues would have eventually vanished. Because the
first business of any parent is to make sure that his or her child can make a living.
Therefore, we decided that, however unpleasant, however contrary to the concept of a
homogeneous society, each racial group would learn his mother tongue as a second
language. Most unhappy for English-speaking Chinese homes and, I am sure, also for
Indian homes. For Malays, nearly all of them spoke Malay at home; so they were happy.
Was that policy right or wrong? If you bring me back to 1965, I would say that is the
policy I would still adopt... Did I legislate it; (tell Chinese-medium school
students) you go to English school, and (learn) Chinese as a second language?
I think we would have lost the next election. Because after Independence, the
enrolment for Chinese schools increased; 1966, over 55 per cent. Many parents thought,
"Yes. Let's do Chinese now. We are out of Malaysia."
I left it alone. By the 1970s, the job market decided what parents chose, and the rush
began to English schools... It became so rapid that I had no choice but to urge
parents to go slow, because we could not produce enough English teachers.
So I faced the problem of (the Chinese-medium) Nanyang University. By 1978, Nanyang
University was in dire straits... It was so bad that when a Nanyang graduate applied
for a job, he would produce his school certificate. Because employers knew that the
Nanyang graduates of the 1950s and 60s were not the same as the Nanyang graduates of
the late 70s. The (good) students had moved across to English schools.
Do we allow this to go on? What was the solution? We tried to convert Nantah from
within, get the teachers to lecture in English because they all had American PhDs.
They could not. They had lost their English fluency. So we moved the whole campus into
University of Singapore... We decided to merge the two universities and made it the
National University of Singapore.
I have been berated all these years by the Chinese-educated in Malaysia for having
killed Chinese education. I am a convenient excuse for letting off their frustrations.
They are not really hating me. They are saying, "Look. Please don't go that way in
Malaysia."
If you have a unified system based on the national language, that will be a big
problem for the Chinese community. It is not a problem here because I never forced
anybody into the English stream. They could have chosen Chinese as their primary
language and English as a secondary language. But career prospects determined what
they chose.
Will we ever become completely homogeneous, a melange of languages and cultures? No.
Why did we take this route? Because we have no other choice. If we have only English
and we allowed the other languages to atrophy and vanish, we face a very serious
problem of identity and culture.
How do I know this? Because I learnt Chinese late in life, and I rediscovered snatches
of what I heard when my parents, my grandparents spoke: "Ah! yes, that was what they
meant." It resonates, pulled at my heartstrings. Would I want to see it lost?
Absolutely not!...
I tell all parents, "Look at your child carefully. Consider how much he can take - one
or the other - and decide what you want." I will give you a series of options. You
want Chinese as your master language, go ahead. You want English, how much. And how
much Chinese. A series of options. But remember the choice is yours. If you make the
wrong decision over your child's capability, do not blame the Government.
|
|
|
Edited by Iversen on 28 March 2015 at 11:00am
1 person has voted this message useful
| QiuJP
Triglot
Senior Member
Singapore
Joined 5857 days ago
428 posts - 597 votes
Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French
Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese
| Message 3 of 21 28 March 2015 at 8:13am | IP Logged |
Mods can you fix the links? They don't work the way it is intended for.
1 person has voted this message useful
| 
Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6705 days ago
9078 posts - 16473 votes
Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan
Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian
Personal Language Map
| Message 4 of 21 28 March 2015 at 11:04am | IP Logged |
I have fixed the links. Long links get unwanted spaces if you use the button in the edit box. You can avoid this by writing the tags by hand and inserting them by hand from the address field in your browser OR by removing the invisible spaces at each line end.
1 person has voted this message useful
| QiuJP
Triglot
Senior Member
Singapore
Joined 5857 days ago
428 posts - 597 votes
Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French
Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese
| Message 5 of 21 28 March 2015 at 5:36pm | IP Logged |
Thanks, Iversen, for the help and the advice.
1 person has voted this message useful
| shk00design
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 4446 days ago
747 posts - 1123 votes
Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin
Studies: French
| Message 6 of 21 29 March 2015 at 4:18am | IP Logged |
I was in Hong Kong last year. There was an article from the local newspaper "The South China Morning Post"
entitled: "No Happy Medium". Basically the fight is over Mandarin education in Hong Kong schools. Hong
Kong was a British colony until 1997. The students had a choice to attend local Chinese schools where the
core subjects in the curriculum were taught in Cantonese and the other was English language class. If you
attended an English class, you would have your core subjects in English and 1 Chinese language class per
day.
After the handover, the Chinese government on the Mainland wanted to add Mandarin to the list of languages
so students would be studying a third language Mandarin along with Cantonese & English. However, when the
local Hong Kong government (which is pro-Beijing) wanted local Chinese schools to start switching from
Cantonese to Mandarin for teaching core subjects such as Mathematics, Chinese literature, etc., many local
parents got upset. Many thought the Beijing government was moving too quickly to bring Hong Kong closer to
the "motherland" and would eventually destroy Hong Kong's unique language (Cantonese) and way of life.
In Singapore, the students who attend local Chinese schools would be learning Simplified Chinese characters
using Pinyin. People would put aside regional differences of their ancestors and learn their native dialects
(Hakka, Hokkien, Cantonese, etc) at home. In Hong Kong, there was about 150 years separation from China
that the people have so far been reluctant to adopt Simplified Chinese characters. Some refuse to learn
Mandarin and prefer to be more fluent in English instead. In Singapore, a Chinese is a Chinese. But in Hong
Kong, the Chinese are not all equal. The Mainlanders tend to be stereotyped as the Chinese with less
education and have bad manners.
Edited by shk00design on 29 March 2015 at 4:19am
1 person has voted this message useful
| QiuJP
Triglot
Senior Member
Singapore
Joined 5857 days ago
428 posts - 597 votes
Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French
Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese
| Message 7 of 21 29 March 2015 at 1:39pm | IP Logged |
shk00design, the main difference between Hong Kong and Singapore is that the latter is a
sovereign country while the former is a colony that is transferred to China. This
difference resulted in different social developments even though both territories are in
many ways similar to each other. As mentioned in the second post, the need for a
Singaporean identity over the ethnicity, together with the need of economic development,
resulted in a firm decision to place a English first policy. However, Mr Lee doesn't want
us to lose our Asian identity, so he introduced the bilingual policy of learning "mother
tongue" as Second language. This policy, however, generated new problems mentioned on the
first post.
1 person has voted this message useful
| QiuJP
Triglot
Senior Member
Singapore
Joined 5857 days ago
428 posts - 597 votes
Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French
Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese
| Message 8 of 21 30 March 2015 at 6:39pm | IP Logged |
Another famous campaign by Mr Lee is the "Speak Mandarin campaign", which encourages the
use of Mandarin over the use of various dialects in the daily life among the Chinese.
This campaign is a success as there are many Mandarin speakers than dialect speakers
today. It also remove the division of the Chinese community by various dialect groups and
clans.
I know that many of us here are against the use of one "dialect" to replace other less
privileged "dialects". But, it was necessary in order to overcome the social and
economical issues, which might make the small country vulnerable.
1 person has voted this message useful
|
This discussion contains 21 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3 Next >>
You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum
This page was generated in 1.3594 seconds.
DHTML Menu By Milonic JavaScript
|
Language Learning Forum : General discussion
Printable version
