21 January 2011:
The thing with mother tongue, again.
Somewhere last year, the issue of mother tongue was brought to light when Education Minister "hinted" that the weightage of mother tongue will be reduced in PSLE. This time, mother tongue has again came into the news, luckily not in a controversy.The report for mother tongue education came out on 18th, and on the 19th it was reported in the papers. Generally, anything relating mother tongue has garnered quite a lot of interest, so I suppose this one too. One of the issues they plan to tackle is to let students learn something more relevant to their daily life.
For example, 伫立 is a rather expressive way of saying stand. This is a phrase in S3 Higher Chinese. If you were to go out and poll people who frequently speak Chinese in Singapore, how many will really use this phrase? No doubt, by learning it, students are improving their vocabulary, but their motive of learning will be different.
To the students, they will learn it just to get good results during the 'O' Levels. I believe, sadly, that is what quite a number of students are doing. After the 'O' Levels, they will 把東西還給老師, or rather wipe it off their mind. Then, their is no purpose of learning Chinese.
That's why, it's a good thing that the ministry is now trying to change it to make it more relating to daily life. This way, students will be less likely to "return" these knowledge to their teachers once they have graduated, because they will still use most of the phrases.
Another good thing about the change was that students would have to learn typing in Chinese a few years later. If I'm not wrong, it will even be tested in the exams. Putting aside the trouble it would take to test students, I feel that it is rather relevant.
The mode of communication is switching from snail mail to e-mail. In fact, it already has a long time ago. Hence, it would be good that students can at least learn how to type Chinese, so that they can apply it next time.
On a sidenote, the recent demographic shows that dialect speaking is on the drop in Singaporean households. Needless to explain, this is the result of MM Lee's Speak Chinese Campaign, that started many years ago.
Personally, I don't really agree with the firmness of this campaign. Although it was good foresight to slowly cut down on dialects and generalise with Mandarin, but this has led to a generation of non-dialect speakers (almost all).
There are plenty of times when I encounter shocked stallholders because I use dialect to converse with them. This is a pretty good gauge of how many teenagers (or kids) still know how to speak dialect. Then, there are the ones (the kids or teenagers, I mean) that only, or rather, selectively learn the vulgarities of a dialect.
Vulgarities are, after all, part of the whole language (or rather dialect). It's no use trying to cover it up, and reveal the "good-looking" part of the dialect. Sooner or later, it will spread, and people will know.
I feel that the policy (is it called a policy?) should be loosened slightly. Although there has been a gradual loosening over the past few years, I still feel that the grip on dialects is still too strong.