Tamil language education: Responses to new challenges

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.