Spoken Mandarin competence of Chinese children from different language-speaking homes: Implications for Mandarin education

Abstract

Bilingualism has been the language education focus of Singapore, but concern has arisen for the increasing imbalance of bilingual abilities among Chinese children, due to shift in the use of home-language from Mandarin to English. In order to understand the difference in Mandarin competence among Singaporean Chinese children, this study analyzes syntactic complexity of Chinese preschool children from different language-speaking homes. This study finds that children from different home-language backgrounds bear differences in utterance types, Mean-Length-Utterance and clause relations, but do not vary much in phrase structure types, clause voice and clause forms. This study supports that Mandarin curriculum developers and educators should take children’s different language competences into consideration in their curricular and pedagogic innovation.