Goh, Hock Huan

"This Report is submitted by the Chinese Language Research Team, CRPP, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. The Report provides the main results of a special focused project of CRPP, entitled "An Investigation of Singaporean Chinese Children's Oral Linguistic Competence in Mandarin: A Corpus-Driven Study". For this project, there are two main research objectives. One is to generate an oral Mandarin word list of Singaporean Chinese children for the CL curriculum developers and CL teachers. The other is to find out whether there are marked differences between children who claimed to speak English predominantly at home and those who claimed to speak Mandarin predominantly at home in terms of their oral lexical coverage and oral fluency of Mandarin before they start to learn Mandarin in primary schools."-- [p. 1] of executive summary.

"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.

This report provides preliminary findings of research work in progress, drawing on the initial set of Chinese classroom data from the Core Project by the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice (CRPP). It describes Chinese Language pedagogic practice observed using the CRPP's Pedagogy Coding Scheme and Mother Tongue coding menu. The report pays special attention to identifying how the classroom is socially organised, what pedagogical activities are carried out, what knowledge is emphasised, and how it is classified. The report concludes with a brief discussion of the major features in relation to the current research literature, and highlights some implications for future Chinese pedagogical research and classroom practice in Singapore.

As a variation of the Chinese language, Singapore Mandarin has its characteristics which represent themselves in phonetics, vocabulary, and grammar. Factors contributing to these characteristics are many: 1. Ancestors of Chinese Singaporeans mainly came from southern China and Singapore Chinese has been influenced by Hokkien, Cantonese, and Hakka; 2. Since the British rule, English had been the official language and keeps to be at a dominant position since independence of Singapore. Similarly, Singapore Chinese bears certain characteristics of the English language; 3. The population of Singapore is composed of Chinese, Malay, and Indian. In the course of interaction between nations, Singapore Chinese was also influenced by languages of the other two races, Malay in particular; 4. Since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, great social changes led to great changes in the Chinese language. However, for quite some time, communication between China and Singapore was stopped, so was the interaction between Mandarin and Singapore Chinese. Due to all these factors, Singapore Chinese has many unique characteristics comparing with standard modern Chinese. Data for current study come from Singapore Children Spoken Mandarin Corpus and this study tries to probe into usage and origin of some uniquely Singapore vocabulary in the Chinese language, which reflects Chinese Singaporeans’ unique identity formed in this unique historical, cultural, geographical, and racial environment.

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.

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 this report, we analyze critically the newly revised Chinese syllabus for Singapore primary school students. In this report, we divide the discussion into four parts. In the first part, we have a brief overview of the current pedagogic discourses in the Singapore context. In the overview, we outline the theoretical motivation that has driven the current pedagogic discourses in comparison with the traditional Chinese pedagogic principles. In the second part we discuss the research method where we identify the major parameters (e.g., curricular goals, objectives, linguistic/cultural emphases, theory/beliefs of Chinese language learning) common to any syllabus design and highlight our analytical foci in the syllabus examination. In the third part, we describe and analyze the contents of the syllabus within the theoretical framework with the main parameters/categories identified in the overview for capturing specific emphases/features stipulated in the syllabus and discuss their (in)coherence. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of the findings for possible changes in Chinese curriculum development."-- [p. 1].

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.