December 2, 2009 by admin
Filed under Opinion, Society
Leave a comment
By Nicholas Tan
Long regarded as the crux of Singapore’s financial, political
and national success, the bilingualism policy has come under the
limelight recently, all thanks to Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s apology for his
mistakes in the policy.
When the policy was meted out four decades ago, Mr Lee said: “if
we were monolingual in our mother tongues, we would not make a
living.”
Nobody can deny the fact that as a result of learning our
sciences and mathematics in English, we can go almost anywhere to
further our education and earn a living as a scientist or a lawyer.
MNCs and research companies have no qualms about setting up
regional bases here and directly contributing to our economy.
However a further prognosis of Mr Lee did not quite materialize. He
predicted that ”Becoming monolingual in English would have been a
setback.
We would have lost our cultural identity, that quiet confidence
about ourselves and our place in the world.” Regrettably, the
younger generation has already shown signs of that much unwanted
setback despite NOT being monolingual. We might, with some
difficulty, claim to be bilingual but we are definitely not
bicultural. The younger generation has lost interest in the Chinese
language because of the way Chinese is taught in schools: rigid,
boring and meaningless. Chinese literature and culture are out of
the question if students loathe the medium of instruction. It is
hardly perplexing that most of us know nothing about cultural
heritage and identity.
What might be happening? A fundamental principle of our
governance is that education keeps up with economic growth and
society. Consequentially, we learn a language if it is beneficial
to the country, regardless of personal interest. For instance, we
learn mother tongue to promote communication and economic
cooperation with other countries.
The Chinese language is emphasized in particular because the
government wants Singaporeans to leverage on the rapid growth of
China. The problem occurs when the pressure on students comes in
the form of ‘forced’ learning of the written and spoken forms of
Chinese over a short period of time in order to ‘keep up with the
economy’. Our ‘comprehensive’ Chinese education lasts from primary
school to pre-university education (JC/polytechnic), after which
hardly anyone reads or writes Chinese anymore. At best, we use a
mixture of Chinese and English in our daily conversations in
addition to losing almost all writing and reading skills. Is this
the kind of attitude and level of Chinese literacy desirable in a
population expected to deal with native speakers of Chinese?
It would be exaggerated to claim that we are all jaded victims
of the bilingualism policy, for I consider myself a relatively
grateful survivor of the policy. I enjoy speaking and writing
Chinese and it still surprises me how some of my peers abhor the
language.
Learning Chinese was not enjoyable because one had to go through
the rites of dictation and ‘ting xie’ year after year. It was a
chore, a pain, but it gradually became bearable as I was moulded by
being around Chinese-speaking friends and grew to like Chinese
music and Taiwanese entertainment shows. These seem like trivial
and silly reasons but they all point to the fact that to learn
Chinese, one has to enjoy the process. Make it ‘fun’, as Mr Lee
Kuan Yew puts. However, learning Chinese should not be achieved by
removing the arduous process of ‘ting xie’ and ‘mo xie’ (it’s not
madness, really.) Instead, the focus should lie on inculcating
interest in the language out of a school setting.
Family and friends play an important role in shaping one’s
attitude towards the language. For example, it helps that families
try to speak Chinese at home to help students habituate into
speaking mandarin. It is not easy to create a whole new environment
around the student, one that facilitates enjoyable learning of the
language, but learning a new language is not meant to be
effortless.
The top PSLE student this year came from Guangzhou in 2006 and
began learning English here. She attributed her success to ‘library
trips and encouragement from family and friends to speak English’.
Furthermore, she admits that there were no short-cuts to learning a
language. Her achievement proved that language learning is hard
work; lowering standards or removing burdensome procedures of
writing do not solve the problem. I also caution against excessive
use of English in teaching Chinese because the two languages are
very different in nature and by using English, we are conveying the
message that there are ‘equivalents’ in Chinese for everything in
English and vice versa.
They all sound more like restrictions than advice to learning a
new language. Well, not every individual has a flair for language
learning and we have all come to realize that some people are more
bilingual than others. Apart from the dearth of a conducive
environment for learning Chinese, more commonly there is a lack of
motivation. It is impressive to read about people who push
themselves to the limit to learn 8 or more languages, all out of
passion, but it is idealistic to expect such ardor in our students.
Why not separate students into groups of ‘I love Chinese’ and ‘I
just want to get it over and done with’? It would be nice to reward
passionate learners with the chance to learn more and guarantee
release for the uninterested after imparting the most essential
‘knowledge’.
We need to replace the image that Chinese is just another
subject one has to mindlessly memorize for twelve years before
throwing it away with a precious gift of heritage. For the few who
have suffered under the bilingualism policy such that their talents
went unrecognized and emigration was the only way out, it is sad to
see them forsake valuable cultural assets for the development of
their limitless aptitude.
In the earlier years of Singapore’s independence, the situation
was reverse. There was a greater proportion of mandarin-speaking
families and we were figuring out ways of better grasping the
English language. How did we become better at English over the
years? Encouraging families to communicate more in English and
gradually shifting from Chinese-medium schools to English-medium
schools were some contributing factors. As much as these changes
improved our English, they reduced Chinese and other mother tongues
to mere subjects like mathematics. Could there be a similar
reversal in favour of the Chinese language? Bilingualism was borne
out of Singapore’s need to operate globally and ‘retain’ cultural
identity; it is time we put more effort into its second
objective.
About the Author:
Nicholas was born and bred in Singapore. Like most other
Singaporean males, he ad undergone primary, secondary, JC
education and full-time national service.
Currently, Nicholas is an undergraduate of the University
of Western Australia.
