Goh, Hock Huan

In this report, we analyze critically the newly revised Chinese textbooks for Singapore primary school students. We divide the discussion into four parts. In the first part, we have a brief introduction of the context where the Chinese language textbooks were revised. In the introduction, we also discuss the rationale why the study of the textbooks are important and outline our research questions. In the second part we discuss the research method where we identify the major parameters and highlight our analytical foci in the textbook examination. In the third part, we describe and analyze how lessons are organized and what pedagogic activities are planned. In the fourth part, we examine what linguistic knowledges are prioritized. In the fifth part, we identify what cultural knowledges are selected and emphasized. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of the findings for possible changes in Chinese textbook development.

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.

In a bilingual society like Singapore, home language environment HLE) of Singaporean children is becoming increasingly concerned, specially for those who are yet to have formal education in schools. The reported rapid shift of family language has increased the tensions among families, schools and communities. This study examined some of the many facets of Singaporean Chinese preschoolers’ HLE, and further discussed how these facets are related to children’s Chinese language proficiency in oral and written forms. Three hundred and seventy-six Singaporean Chinese six-year olds completed Chinese oral and written language proficiency screening. Their parents completed a HLE survey. The findings revealed the possible trend of home language shift from Mandarin Chinese to English in the younger generation. Aside from home language use factors, the importance of other facets that form a rich language environment is also highlighted for children's language development.

Existing studies have evidenced that mobile-assisted vocabulary learning, which allows students to create artefacts and engage in productive skills, can help them in vocabulary learning. However, there remains little research and validated approaches for designing seamless vocabulary learning experiences for young learners. In this paper, a seamless vocabulary learning system was specifically designed for young learners. The study involved three classes of primary 2 students to investigate the learning effectiveness of seamless vocabulary learning, with a focus on analyzing student-generated artefacts. The results validated the effectiveness of seamless vocabulary learning for young learners, emphasizing the importance of strengthening the connection between home-based learning and classroom-based learning. The study also indicated the pivotal role of providing students with opportunities to improve their artefacts constantly across different learning contexts.

Policy makers have acknowledged that the Chinese language (CL) proficiency of Singapore’s Chinese children is diversified due to the different exposure to CL use at home (CLRC, 1999; CLCPRC, 2004; MTLRC, 2010), and there is an urgent need to understand the differences among Chinese children’s CL competence and their home language background. However, studies on child language in Singapore are mostly done from a psychometric testing tradition (e.g., Chong, 1999; Dixon, 2004; Soh, 1987) whereby studies using real-time oral data are rare. Therefore, this study attempts to examine and compare Singaporean Chinese preschoolers’ Mandarin competence in relation to their home-language exposure with real-time data from the Singapore Children Spoken Mandarin Corpus (SCSMC).

Drawing upon the theory of bilingual continuum of Valdés (2001), this study advances an analytical framework, namely the "Continua of Mandarin Exposure and Competence" that encapsulates the Mandarin competence of the general Singaporean Chinese-English bilingual children in relation to their Mandarin exposure. This framework hypothesises that the children’s Mandarin exposure is positively correlated with their linguistic competence in terms of lexical diversity (LD) and syntactic complexity (SC), and negatively correlated with their alternative communicative competence in terms of code-switching (CS) to English.

To prove the hypothesis, oral language data of 80 Chinese preschoolers were drawn from the SCSMC and processed by means of automated lexical segmentation, Parts-of Speech (PoS)-tagging, and manual annotation of syntactic and code-switching categories. The differences in Mandarin proficiency of four different groups of children, who represented four typical home-language backgrounds from predominately Englishspeaking homes to predominantly Mandarin-speaking homes, were compared in light of their home-language exposure. This study found that there were differences in lexical and syntactic competence among the four comparedhome-language groups. These differences of linguistic competence were found to be statistically significant, and significant positive correlations were found among the indices with increased Mandarin exposure. Communicative competence differences were also found to be statistically significant among the four home-language groups, in particular, significant negative correlations were found on the CS indices with increased Mandarin exposure.

With the various correlations established, the link between home-language exposure and language competence was established. The statistical results of the LD, SC and CS have shown that there are differences in Mandarin proficiency between or among Singapore’s Chinese children as a result of the degree of exposure to different home-language backgrounds. Singapore’s Chinese children's Mandarin competence can be considered a continuum of English and Mandarin with a tendency of moving either towards the end of English or towards the end of Mandarin, but it is difficult to distinguish one from the other in terms of their Mandarin competence. In particular, children who are bilingually more exposed to both Mandarin and English are the most unpredictable in the continua as their complex exposure to the two languages intricately affects their Mandarin competence. Their volubility in Mandarin competence distinguishes them remarkably from their counterparts at the extreme ends of the continuum, while it is not different from their counterparts somewhere in the middle of the continua.

"The aim of the research is to examine whether there are similarities and differences among the different modules of the newly developed Chinese curriculum experimented in primary schools, and between the experimental and control classes in terms of pedagogical practices. These findings have great implications for further implementation of the new curriculum in the classroom and curriculum development in the future."-- [p. 1] of executive summary.

"Do not speak English during Mandarin lesson!" How many times have we chided our students for code-switching during language lessons? Is code-switching avoidable in a multilingual environment like Singapore? This study sheds some light on the phenomenon.