Goh, Hock Huan

"This Report is submitted by the Chinese Language Research Team, CRPP, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. The Report provides the main results of a special focused project of CRPP, entitled "An Investigation of Singaporean Chinese Children's Oral Linguistic Competence in Mandarin: A Corpus-Driven Study". For this project, there are two main research objectives. One is to generate an oral Mandarin word list of Singaporean Chinese children for the CL curriculum developers and CL teachers. The other is to find out whether there are marked differences between children who claimed to speak English predominantly at home and those who claimed to speak Mandarin predominantly at home in terms of their oral lexical coverage and oral fluency of Mandarin before they start to learn Mandarin in primary schools."-- [p. 1] of executive summary.

"The aim of the research is to examine whether there are similarities and differences among the different modules of the newly developed Chinese curriculum experimented in primary schools, and between the experimental and control classes in terms of pedagogical practices. These findings have great implications for further implementation of the new curriculum in the classroom and curriculum development in the future."-- [p. 1] of executive summary.

As a variation of the Chinese language, Singapore Mandarin has its characteristics which represent themselves in phonetics, vocabulary, and grammar. Factors contributing to these characteristics are many: 1. Ancestors of Chinese Singaporeans mainly came from southern China and Singapore Chinese has been influenced by Hokkien, Cantonese, and Hakka; 2. Since the British rule, English had been the official language and keeps to be at a dominant position since independence of Singapore. Similarly, Singapore Chinese bears certain characteristics of the English language; 3. The population of Singapore is composed of Chinese, Malay, and Indian. In the course of interaction between nations, Singapore Chinese was also influenced by languages of the other two races, Malay in particular; 4. Since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, great social changes led to great changes in the Chinese language. However, for quite some time, communication between China and Singapore was stopped, so was the interaction between Mandarin and Singapore Chinese. Due to all these factors, Singapore Chinese has many unique characteristics comparing with standard modern Chinese. Data for current study come from Singapore Children Spoken Mandarin Corpus and this study tries to probe into usage and origin of some uniquely Singapore vocabulary in the Chinese language, which reflects Chinese Singaporeans’ unique identity formed in this unique historical, cultural, geographical, and racial environment.

Bilingualism has been the language education focus of Singapore, but concern has arisen for the increasing imbalance of bilingual abilities among Chinese children, due to shift in the use of home-language from Mandarin to English. In order to understand the difference in Mandarin competence among Singaporean Chinese children, this study analyzes syntactic complexity of Chinese preschool children from different language-speaking homes. This study finds that children from different home-language backgrounds bear differences in utterance types, Mean-Length-Utterance and clause relations, but do not vary much in phrase structure types, clause voice and clause forms. This study supports that Mandarin curriculum developers and educators should take children’s different language competences into consideration in their curricular and pedagogic innovation.