Publication: Spoken Mandarin competence of Chinese children from different language-speaking homes: Implications for Mandarin education
Date
2008-03
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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.
Description
Keywords
Language Competence, Syntactic Complexity, Mandarin Education, Home-language
Citation
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New York, 2008