Seetha Lakshmi

Tamil Language is one of the longest surviving classical languages. Its literary and linguistic affluence dates back to some 2500 years. It has its official status in Tamil Nadu, India where it originated from, and it is one of the official languages of Singapore and Sri Lanka. In Malaysia, it has nurtured students for two centuries, actively progressing through Tamil Primary Schools as the main medium of instruction and as a subject in secondary schools. It enjoys the status as family language and community language in the Tamil diaspora in many countries. Although Tamil language’s presence can be felt strongly in its native land and overseas, its usage is continuously evolving. This paper outlines the changing trend of Tamil language in Tamil Nadu, Singapore and Tamil diaspora societies. Although the native speakers, especially young native speakers, are immersing themselves in Tamil language, Tamil diaspora communities do face challenges. Youngsters are challenged in acquiring the language and sustaining their functional language competence. This is because the language is losing its status as the medium of interaction in the Tamil community as there is pressure to adapt to the host country’s lifestyle and achieve the goals of survival.

The paper critically explains the history of Singapore’s Tamil Language Education, its achievements, challenges, and long-term goals. Internationally, Tamil education contributes as an education model for mother tongue, minority, and heritage languages. Within Singapore Tamil education, Tamil tertiary programmes: BEd, MEd, new Tamil Curriculum initiatives in Spoken Tamil, Pedagogy: Strategies for second language teaching, Educational Research in Spoken Tamil, Teacher Talk & Corpus data, and PD courses has been developed to build Tamil teachers’ capacity in a multicultural context. These papers describe contributions from diverse Tamil educational and linguistic dimensions and resources for implementing new initiatives in Tamil Education.

Teacher education is the backbone of a country’s socio-economic development. For countries like Singapore, teacher education is vital to the development of its citizens and the sustainment of its knowledge-based economy. Designing a 21stcentury teacher education curriculum, enactment, evaluation and systematic review are key procedures here. National Institute of Education’s ‘A Teacher Education Model for the 21st Century (TE21) Framework’ (2009) fosters the enhanced partnership model with 6 key recommendations to equip the teachers to become skilled 21st century teachers for 21st century students. With strong ethical attitudes, values, skills, knowledge, hard work and continuous motivation, the 21st century teachers can be developed and sustained in their service. This paper traces the journey of teacher education programmes conducted by National Institute of Education and Finland by highlighting the importance of planning, developing and sustaining the 21st century teachers. As Finland is well known for its structured teacher training and high-quality teacher education with research orientation, a comparative study of the systems would be beneficial and enlightening.

Today’s 21st globalized world expects different set of skills from our young students. Hence the educators and the leaders in educational field need to inculcate surviving skills for 21st century and relevant knowledge to their students. For this, the educators and leaders of educational institutions at all levels are being trained themselves and developing their capabilities. This will enable the future citizens of the global world to be equipped with knowledge, skills, and experience to work for employers with high expectations and far-sighted goals. Currently, the knowledge based functional skills that are expected among our students are ability to use the digital technology, assessing capability of technological information and the intelligence to integrate the information and create new information. These skills are felt necessary at functional level in the knowledge-based economy (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2004). Using technology (Mike Eisenberg, Doug Johnson & Bob Berkowitz, 2010) in a responsible and ethical way to do research and solve the problems of a community is a level of skills needed for today’s youth. To develop this kind of future leaders, the educators and institutional leaders have to formulate themselves as 21st century educators and educational leaders. This paper will highlight the place of ICT in today’s knowledge based economy and how it plays a critical role in developing young students to facilitate the growth of knowledge based economy (Kenneth J. Literacy & Kenneth J. Luterbach, 2011) with a reference to ICT in Singapore’s Educational Institutions.

Mother Tongue, Heritage Language, First Language and Second Language have their unique and in-depth meanings in today’s globalization. In Singapore, we have a special arrangement in our bilingual education. Ideally, a child acquires its first language i.e. its mother tongue, at home and come to the school to learn English. Under our Singapore’s meaningful bilingual policy, a child learns English at School as first language and mother tongue language at second language level. Mother tongue acquisition provides a strong foundation to itself and for the facilitation of English language. It is an additional resource for a child to use its mother tongue language to learn and acquire English. Parents can believe this to introduce mother tongue language and English at home. Without the mother tongue language acquisition, the child will lose its invaluable ancestors’ language and its rich cultural benefits. Outside Tamil Nadu (India) and Sri Lanka Tamil language has its official language status in Singapore along with Chinese, Malay and English. Government continuously supports all of its initiatives towards Tamil. Let us continuously let a Tamil child to acquire its cultural language, that is, its mother tongue language (Tamil) and also to develop its character and confidence. As educators, we can try our best to facilitate them to use Standard Spoken Tamil (Spoken Tamil), create interesting story books and design our lessons based on their interesting topics. In today’s globalization, it is unique and important for a child to know its Mother tongue language to understand its linguistic and cultural features and develop itself as a confident user of its cultural language. And also, to stand on its own without losing the identity. This also provides a great opportunity to be bilingual and a bicultural citizen.