Tamil corpus bank and students’ spoken language - An overview [தமிழ்த் தரவு வங்கியும் மாணவர்களின் பேச்சுமொழியும் – ஒரு பார்வை]

This paper highlights the use of Standard Spoken Tamil (SST) in Tamil classrooms in Singapore. Tamil language is one of the official languages in Singapore and is taught as a Mother Tongue Language subject at second language level in schools. Due to changing demographic patterns, majority of young students come from homes where English is the dominant language and are acquiring Standard Spoken Tamil (MOE, 2005) in their Tamil language classes. The implementation of Standard Spoken Tamil into curriculum took place in 2005. The research project team (DEV13/15 SL) has been working on creating a corpus bank of the classroom spoken language. Out of the 27 classrooms selected, data was collected from 14 classrooms through audio and video recordings which have been transcribed into Tamil and translated into English to create a corpus. The corpus has the potential materials to conduct courses for teachers to develop their teaching (Chambers, Farr and O’Riordan, 2011; Cubero and Ignacio, 2011; Honan, 2010, Zaki, 2017) approaches and strategies based on the students’ use of language in the Tamil classrooms. Data from six Primary and eight Secondary classroom lessons were analysed to examine the teachers’ and students’ use of SST during their lessons. Preliminary findings show that there is a significant improvement in the use SST between teachers and students due to their mutual understanding, sustained engagement, encouragement and motivation in the class.