Poor quality
English in Singapore
My sister teaches French as a
foreign language to secondary school pupils with ages ranging from
13 to 17. In Singapore, French is classified as a third language,
which means that only those schoolchildren who are bright and doing
well in English, their second language and some other subjects, are
permitted to add French to their workload.
Thus, the students she
gets tend to be the top 2 or 3 percent of each age
cohort.
"Can you imagine,
then," she said to me recently, "how shocked I was that no one in
my class of 13-year-olds understood the English verb, to
bat."
"No one among the creme
de la creme of our schoolkids had come across that verb
before!"
She was introducing the
French word battre, and she tried to get the students to
guess its meaning by telling them that the English word, to
bat, comes from it.
Whereupon, nearly
everyone in the class thought that battre was a kind of
animal.
She doesn't like to use
English in her French class, so she started swinging her arms to
suggest a kind of action. She said it wasn't an animal, it wasn't
even a noun, but a verb. Alas, that still led nowhere. If not a
bat, then what?
So an exception had to
be made. She had to give a clue in English. "It's similar to to
hit"
And that brought on the
second shock: some in the class weren't familiar with hit
either.
So she took up
something in her hand and started batting something else with
it.
"What am I doing?" she
asked, hoping to get some idea what English vocabulary her pupils
had.
At last, their faces
bloomed with comprehension. "Beat", some said. "Bit" others
said.
* * * *
*
"Yes, I think it's
shocking," I said, agreeing with her. "If they've never seen that
word, does it mean they've never read Enid Blyton, which they
should have by the time they're 12?"
"They do
multiple-choice assessment exercises," she replied,
dryly.
* * * *
*
It's not just the 13
year-olds. In another class, an older teenager, practising his
French, constructed a sentence about going somewhere on the
MRT.
My sister then asked
him to explain what he meant by 'MRT'; it's just an acronym and an
English one to boot. If you spoke to someone in France, it wouldn't
do to merely say 'MRT', as no one would
understand.
The boy thought for a
moment, and then said, "train".
Now, "train" is a very
broad concept, but try as she might, my sister couldn't get him to
be more specific about his mode of transport. She began to suspect
it wasn't because of any difficulty with French -- his wasn't too
bad -- but was more due to the fact that he had no idea what other
kinds of trains there were in this world and therefore didn't know
where to begin to delineate the MRT (our local slang for the metro)
from the broader concept of rail-borne
transportation.
To him, metro (which he
knew only as MRT) and train were synonymous. It's like asking
someone to distinguish 'mother' from 'maternal
parent'.
* * * * *
We were not yet rolling
on the tarmac, and there would be a little time to make some
commercial announcements before take-off. The Tiger Airways cabin
attendant then took up the microphone to introduce a line of
souvenirs, among which was an exclusive selection of fra-grAH'n-
ses, a word that I had never heard before. The accent was on the
much-elongated second syllable and it sounded like
bra-DANces.
I was still bemused by
that strange pronunciation, when bad grammar hit. "I let you have
more information after airborne."
She had to pass the
microphone to her colleague, as we had begun taxiing, and it was
time for the safety demonstration.
We were told that to
undo the seat belt, we had to leaf this catch... and that there
were six emergency exzeeds on this aircraft.
* * * *
*
Seated opposite me in
the metro, a middle-aged executive was telling his friend what
difficulties he had in his office as he tried to improve
productivity and efficiency. Apparently, one of his more difficult
subordinates was a young woman who was too often on the
phone.
"I told her, when I
work that time, I don't take personal core one." He doesn't take
personal calls.
* * * * *
Then this evening the
sitcom Phua Chu Kang was on television. The entire series revolves
around a working-class building contractor who speaks Singlish, our
local patois.
In this evening's
episode, he was trying very hard to get his son and daughter into a
top-grade private school, in the course of which, Phua had to deal
with a Caucasian headmistress who spoke a very uppercrust
English.
Sitcom series being
what they are, the audience would long have built up empathy for
Phua Chu Kang and his highly accented English and fractured
sentences. The natural instinct in the audience would therefore be
to see the headmistress and her brand of English, complete with
well-rounded sentences and mellifluous intonation as much too alien
and uppity.
* * * *
*
These vignettes give
you an idea how intractable is the "English problem" in
Singapore.
We have children
growing up who spend more time in exam drills than reading, and
whose vocabulary ends up quite limited. We have youngsters with
very little idea of the wider world and who think that the
references and terms we use in Singapore are the references and
terms used throughout the world.
We have huge problems
with pronunciation -- in fact, as far as I know, the teaching of
English in Singapore does not include the teaching of pronunciation
-- due to the infiltration of Chinese and Malay vocalisation sets
into English.
We have even bigger
problems with grammar, because people don't read and aren't exposed
to good English. Instead, they hear a blend of Chinese, Malay and
English grammar, which is etched into their brains as the operating
grammar to emulate.
Not least, we have a
tendency to see good English as either quaint, only used by stiff
old ladies, or arrogant, only used by those bigheaded ones who
think themselves better than their peers. If you don't wish to lose
your friends, DON'T speak like an angmoh (local slang for
Caucasian).
* * * * *
No effort here to speak
English well
In late November last year, I was fortunate to return to Singapore
as a learner with a very diverse cross-cultural group of
postgraduate and research students. We belonged to eight or nine
nationalities and our ages ranged from 24 to 60. I was the
oldest.
Our project was to investigate cross-cultural and inter-cultural
management skills and subsequently use such skills to form
strategies for negotiations at different levels of business. We had
chosen Singapore as our springboard.
As we got down to work, I was most impressed by the ability of
Singaporeans to accept strange people with strange questions.
However, I was quite disappointed at the level of spoken English
among the public - young people, shop assistants, bus drivers, MRT
officials and so on.
No doubt, they could speak and understand English to a reasonable
level but there did not seem to be any effort to speak in complete
sentences or even speak coherently without the interjection of
other dialectal or language words, although I realise it adds
colour to the local communicative processes.
Those who did speak in complete sentences spoke really well and it
was attributed to their job requirements. I was, however, quite
disappointed when, on two occasions at a big shopping centre, I met
some school teachers taking their Primary 3 and 4 pupils out on an
excursion - the teachers were not speaking to the kids in complete
sentences.
The impression left is a seeming disregard of the use of proper
spoken English.
In contrast, when I spent two weeks in Shanghai on a business trip
- where I had many opportunities to come into contact with
students, teachers and those connected with tourism - I found that
most of them were putting in a great deal of effort to speak
English well, not only in full comprehensible sentences, but also
with correct pronunciation, intonation and style.
Now, in all fairness, if I had not been part of a team of learners
looking deeper into inter-cultural issues, I might not even have
noticed the level of spoken English here and, even if I had, would
not have thought any more about it, like during my past visits to
Singapore.
When I was growing up in Singapore, we were punished at school each
time we spoke improper English or mispronounced a word. So it is
most likely that Singaporeans of my vintage would today speak
reasonably good English. Regardless of our cultural heritage, we
had always made great effort to speak English well.
I have always been proud of having had my initial education in
Singapore and proud to say that I learnt how to speak, read and
write English in Singapore.
I wonder whether enough is being done in Singapore's schools and
colleges to foster the correct use of spoken English. Or has it
become less important to speak well?
Richard Teo
Darwin, Australia
How this situation came
about is too complex a tale for here, not that I even know half of
it, but I shall touch briefly on the role played by our
politics.
Up until the 1960s, and
even in schools where English was the medium of instruction, no one
assumed that the children spoke English as a family language.
Consequently, the methods used were those of teaching English as a
second language, which meant very careful attention paid to
enlarging vocabulary and instilling the rules of grammar. Much time
was spent on grammar drills to hone the pupils' skills at things
like the future perfect tense, the subjunctive and the fine shades
of meaning among similar words. See example at right.
However, in the 1970s,
a rapid conversion of all schools into English-medium ones took
place, as the government shut down Chinese, Malay and Tamil-medium
schools. As demand for English teachers grew, so standards fell.
Furthermore, geography, physics or carpentry teachers were also
required to use English in their classes, but as these adults were
not using English as their first language, it meant that the
students would hear broken English from those
teachers.
In addition, the rapid
expansion of English-medium education meant that students from
families that never used English at home had to use English in
school. This was unlike the previous decades when the
English-medium schools tended to attract pupils from homes that did
speak some English. Just when the task of teaching English became
wider and harder, the difficulty of getting teachers who spoke good
English became greater.
At around the same
time, the Education ministry experimented with American teaching
methods. Those were the days when British prestige had sunk to new
lows and even the Sterling Pound had to be bailed out by the IMF.
America was the shining example of modernity. These teaching
methods involved more listening and speaking than being drilled in
grammar rules.
It was a hopelessly
misguided change, for the linguistic background in Singapore was
nothing like White middle-class America, where children absorbed
English with mother's milk. Learning by immersion and example
cannot work if the environment was saturated with bad
English.
(Nowadays, the scales
have fallen from our eyes. Every time we see some American write on
any bulletin board something like, "What I want to know is whether
your expected to tip...." we see living proof that teaching
language without grammar drills simply doesn't work.)
Another American idiocy
imported into our education system was the multiple-choice test. I
myself don't remember any use of multiple-choice testing when it
came to English in my schooldays. We had to write long essays. We
had to read and re-read dense passages followed by some questions
to test our understanding of the text, and those questions had to
be answered with a paragraph or two. We had to paraphrase other
sentences or condense an entire paragraph into a key sentence to
capture the gist of it. We had to pen telegrams in exactly 25 words
(which I thought was a useless skill since telegrams were
obsolescent, only to discover decades later that I can tap out more
concentrated sms messages than most). And we had to transpose
sentences into other time frames to test our mastery of tenses, or
insert new ideas into an existing sentence by means of additional
clauses.
How multiple choice
questions would teach students to do all that with language, I
cannot imagine.
Thus, except for a
small minority, the masses picked up, not English, but a corrupted
form of it.
More politics was to
come. The annual Speak Mandarin Campaign confused priorities.
Together with political campaigns against western "yellow culture",
official veneration of Confucianism and emphasis on our "roots",
"aping the West" became a liability. It was a small step from here
to a general ridicule of people with perfect English and
internationally acceptable intonation.
Meanwhile, the
economics-trained technocrats in our government said that Singapore
must preserve our competitive advantages vis-à-vis a rising China, and one of them is the fact that
we're an English-speaking country.
Lo! we're now
officially an English-speaking country, because the government said
so. Therefore, what we speak must be English. If it sounds like
English and the government says it's English, it's English. Since
we have arrived, why is there a need to make an effort to improve
our English?
It's hardly surprising
then that Richard Teo, in his letter to the Straits Times (15
January 2005), said, "there did not seem to be any effort to speak
in complete sentences or even speak coherently without the
interjection of other dialectal or language
words."
As he concluded, there
"is a seeming disregard of the use of proper spoken
English."
Good he left it at
spoken English. He'd get a heart attack if he saw the written
English we have here! 
