Seilhamer, Mark Fifer

This study aims to shed light on the attitudes of Chinese Singaporeans and Chinese nationals residing in Singapore to varieties of Mandarin Chinese. 64 Singaporean Chinese and Chinese national participants took matched and verbal-guise tests, evaluating recorded speakers of two varieties of Singapore Mandarin (standard and colloquial) and the variety spoken in the PRC on status and solidarity traits. These evaluations were followed by optional questionnaire items intended to probe for additional insights into the participants’ attitudes and perceptions of one another. Both Singaporean Chinese and Chinese national participants assigned higher status to the PRC’s variety of Mandarin. Attitudes toward the two varieties of Singapore Mandarin, however, varied, with Singaporeans rating the standard variety higher than the colloquial variety on all traits and Chinese nationals favouring the colloquial variety. Interestingly, for all three varieties of Mandarin, solidarity traits were rated higher than status traits by all participants, suggesting that, in Singapore, Mandarin Chinese is now viewed more as a language of solidarity than status.

This study, situated in a multilingual, English-medium educational context, draws on theory from mathematics and language education to capture teachers’ perspectives on the place of language in their mathematics pedagogy. The benchmark study explored this topic through surveying and interviewing teachers. Additionally, it sought to relate teacher’s views to their practice by focusing on observing three teachers’ mathematics lessons at primary one, three, and five. Findings are that mathematics teachers placed importance on teaching language, being specifically concerned with language as input and comprehension. They taught vocabulary and reading skills in supportive ways explicitly yet differently at the three grade levels. Particularly at the lower levels, teachers contextualized language in the concrete examples employed for mathematics teaching. At all three levels, prominence was given to teaching pupils how to read word problems as well as how to solve them. However, at primary three, a tension was observed between the two aims of teaching mathematical vocabulary and teaching the reading skills for word problems. This paper illustrates the tension and discusses its possible causes.