The Present: An Overview of Teaching Chinese Language in Singapore

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Abstract

The sociolinguistic landscape of Singapore has in recent years been a prominent and unique case for language and social study that bestows the nation with a new title of ‘language laboratory’, besides acclaims like ‘Asia’s four little dragons’ or ‘Garden City’ (Yang. Walking the talk in the ‘Singapore’s language laboratory. In: Tan CL (ed) Teaching of Chinese and literature in Singapore. Zhejiang University Press, Hangzhou, pp 270–272, 2011). Indeed, the swiftness and scale of language change in Singapore in the last 30 years may be unprecedented amongst nation states. In multi-ethnic, multicultural and multilingual Singapore, English has now become not only the most important lingua franca but also the dominant language in daily usage amongst the majority of Singaporeans, especially the young. There are two sets of important statistics reflecting the changing linguistic background of Chinese in Singapore: Firstly, the Census of Population 2010 (Singapore Department of Statistic. Census of population 2010. http://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/data/pdfdoc/20110119004/c2010_r1_press_release.pdf. Accessed 1 Apr 2015, 2011) highlighted that the use of English as the home language has become more prevalent which is in line with the rise of English literacy especially amongst the younger age groups. Secondly, in 2009, 59 % of Primary 1 Chinese students’ parents reported that they spoke mainly English at home. This was a large increase from 28 % in 1991 (Ministry of Education. 2010 mother tongue languages review committee report. Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2011; see Fig. 2.1).

Keywords

Foreign Language Language Learning Chinese Character Language Acquisition Chinese Student 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Singapore Centre for Chinese LanguageSingaporeSingapore

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