Creating a corpus Tamil data bank to investigate the impact of Standard Spoken Tamil (SST) and to provide pedagogical guidance to Tamil teachers on Standard Spoken Tamil (SST) in Singapore

This project aims to develop a Corpus Tamil Data Bank based on classroom studies and observations and analysis to study the impact and the enactment of Standard Spoken Tamil (SST) in Tamil Education This project will provide empirical evidence on the use of SST in Tamil classrooms at Primary and to Secondary levels. SST has been recommended by the Tamil Language Curriculum and Pedagogy Review Committee (Ministry of Education, 2005) to introduce measures to enhance the teaching and learning of Tamil language in Tamil classrooms. With the corpus created, this project examined the enactment of the main recommendations of the review committees (MOE, 2005, Seetha Lakshmi et al., 2006).

The purpose of this project was to create a Corpus Data Bank on Tamil language with classroom video recordings and observations with the aim of investigating the impact of Standard Spoken Tamil (SST) in the Singapore classroom domain on Tamil Teaching. The objective is to provide pedagogical guidance to Tamil language teachers on the use and functions of SST in Tamil teaching and learning. The setting up and collection of a corpus on Tamil classroom data that makes a contribution to this gap in the knowledge and pedagogy of Spoken Tamil.

The data in turn will help develop the teaching and learning of SST in Singapore that will lead to the introduction of effective and sustained measures in enhancing the teaching and learning of SST in the classroom domain. This is in response to the use of SST that was recommended by the Tamil Language Curriculum and Pedagogy Review Committee (MOE, 2005). In examining the enactment of recommendations set by the review committees (MOE, 2005, Seetha Lakshmi et al., 2006, Seetha Lakshmi and Vanithamani Saravanan, 2010), this project, in focusing on spoken Tamil, will bridge the theory and practice of SST with the new Tamil language curriculum that is being implemented in Tamil language classrooms, will provide empirical evidence on the use of SST in Tamil classrooms - from Primary One to Secondary Five. The collection of data on Tamil language Teaching in the Tamil Corpus Data Bank is based on a detailed analysis of the use of SST – with an emphasis on the patterns of interactions in classroom discourse in the Singapore Tamil classrooms. This in turn will allow Tamil language curriculum writers, specialists and educators to produce learning materials that emphasizes the uses and functions of SST in Spoken Tamil in the classroom. It is hoped that the successful completion of this project has the potential for further research projects on SST in the classroom. This will require additional support from NIE and MOE on Tamil Corpus Data projects on the publication of Singapore’s first dictionary of Tamil language education - providing a significant contribution to the use and understanding of SST amongst Tamil language teachers and students