Every child she knows is forced to take private tuition

Source :http://www.asiaone.com/News/Education/Story/A1Story20100511-215526.html
Article by: Barbara Chen (Ms)


EVERY pupil I know requires private tuition in Chinese. At the Chinese tuition centre my children attend, there are even a few children whose parents are native Chinese speakers.

Why do so many of us need help to teach our children Chinese?

One reason is that, contrary to claims, few parents are truly bilingual.


The other is that our children have limited or no contact with Chinese in their living environment.

There is a bias towards English in school, games, Internet activities and, with more than half of them, their families.

English is so dominant that even children from Chinese-speaking households use English as their primary language of communication outside the home.

Small wonder then that foreign students arriving in Singapore with poor English ultimately perform well in English examinations.

With such a language landscape, it is unrealistic to expect most children to achieve the same level of competency in Chinese as in English.

To do so is to burden our children unnecessarily; they already face so much stress in the current system.

A United Nations study in 2001 revealed that Singapore students were more fearful of failing in exams than of a parent dying.

How did we get to this state?

While Chinese is important, can the language be imbibed at a more leisurely pace - for example, spread out over 10 years, with a definitive exam only when they are older, say at age 16?

By that time too, more students can understand better the cultural and economic value of the language, and have a stronger motivation to study it.

Delaying a definitive exam - or reducing the mother tongue weighting - will enable children to keep pace with learning the language and be spared the 'Chinese imperial examinations' at age 12.


How i feel:
After reading the article, i feel attached to the writer. She seems to understand just what students and parents want to convery and how we feel. When i was in Secondary school, i struggled through Chinese just like many other students. That is because our main communicating language between ourselves and our teachers is English. And for all of our subjects except Chinese, everthing is taught in English and we learn using English. So naturally, our base for English is more firm and stable. Luckily the O level system is in such that students are able to take out 1st mother tongue papar at early June. So after our Mother tongue results were released, we can choose whether to retake Chinese language or not in October with the other papers. The had helped many students to gage their base and ability to score.

However, no matter how much i dislike Chinese, my parents do not allow me to speak English at home. They think that that is the only way to maintain our connection with the Chinese language. They have this traditional thinking that - we are Chinese so we should speak Chinese and know all about Chinese and its culture. So in this point of view, i think that Chinese should not be a burden for the students. Chinese language is also becoming more and more important in the world as China is improving rapidly.
Therefore, knowing the Chinese language will be a bonus and huge benefit to us.

I think that 'spreading out over 10 years, with a definitive exam only when they are older, say at age 16?' is unnesessary and the current system is acceptable.

Students, as Chinese, should be able to cope with this subject/language.


KAHMIN