Dr Goh Hock Huan

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Abstract

Singapore has shown success in Mathematics and Science education with its outstanding achievement in TTMSS 1999 and 2007 (Martin et al, 2000; Martin et al, 2008), which, to some extent, is relevant to its language education policy. This policy ensures its students to attain a high level of reading competence in English (Mullis et al, 2003; Mullis et al, 2007), that is sufficient for their acquisition of Mathematics and Science knowledge (Dixon, 2005). However, this policy has given rise to the rapid shift of home language among the Chinese community from the use of Mandarin or Chinese dialects to English, which has resulted in the rise of second language learners in the Chinese language (CL) classrooms in mainstream schools (CLCPRC, 2004; MTLRC, 2010). Other than the Chinese community, CL is also read by children of foreign talents from countries such as Indonesia, Burma, Vietnam, Japan, Korea etc., who come to the CL classroom as foreign language learners. For some reasons, these foreign language learners are seen no different from second language learners and are usually arranged to participate in CL lessons which read curriculum catering to the general Chinese community. This has created pedagogical issues for CL practitioners, and raised the anxiety of these foreign students. To better understand the situation of foreign language learners in the mainstream CL classrooms, I examined lessons recorded from CL classrooms with foreign language learners from two school-based projects of the Singapore Centre for Chinese Language. By means of analysing the transcripts from the CL lessons of these two projects and self-reflections of the teachers involved, it is obvious that teachers are aware that young foreign language learners have needs that are different from the second language learners. As such, the mainstream curriculum may not be suitable for the foreign language learners, and a more communicative-based conversational curriculum should be explored.

Keyword(s) :   Chinese; foreign language; mainstream classroom