Journal Articles - Singapore Journal of Education

The socio-educational approach to measuring language motivation has its focus on social attitude rather than language-relevant feelings and behaviours in the classroom context. The development of two scales for measuring elementary students' motivation to learn Chinese and English reported here is an exploration of a psychology-based approach which may be more meaningful to language teachers. The scales share common items and cover both affective and behavioural aspects of language learning. Very high internal consistency was found for both scales. Discriminant validity was established with reference to student backgrounds, including overall academic performance, gender, language examination grade, home language, and self-evaluation of language ability.

Educators and parents are concerned with the optimal age of introducing a second language to children. This study attempted to find out whether young pre-school children are able to handle two languages competently. Children between the ages of 3.5 and 6 were assessed on a number of language tasks in both English and the mother tongue. Results show that young children found difficulty in learning two languages simultaneously, but the degree of difficulty varied according to the types of second language and the extent of exposures to the two languages in question.