Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen

I have always been disturbed by the dominance of English in Singapore.

A big part of this comes from my own experience.

My grandma for instance, is very quiet at our family dinner tables because often, the younger generation goes about speaking in English. There is no deliberate attempt to leave her out of the conversation, but it happens anyway because she can’t speak English.

What of our history, our family stories, are lost because the older generation are not authorized to speak because they don’t speak the officially sanctioned language?
How can regular Singaporeans be called politically apathetic when politicians only reach out to them linguistically once in four or five years? Are they supposed to be concerned about politics only once in four or five years?

I also grew up with many kids from the Queenstown/ Stirling Road/ Mei Ling Street/ Margaret Drive area with kids whose parents spoke dialect/ mainly Malay/ or mainly Tamil. Most of those who went to the “good” schools (RI, RGS, SAP schools) had parents who spoke English.

I can understand why too, putting myself in the shoes of a child from a home that is predominantly Singlish/ Hokkien/ Cantonese/ Malay/ Tamil speaking going to an English-dominant school system. Many classrooms don’t allow these languages to be spoken, except during 2nd language classes. So, for a Chinese kid, it’s Channel 5 most of the time, and one or two periods a day, we turn to Channel 8. If I were this child, it would be extremely hard for me to put up my hand to answer a question or to ask a question as I don’t speak the language that the teacher speaks. Better to sit back quietly and listen and hope that nobody notices. Or if I put up my hand and ask a question, the teacher might correct my language. So, I would never be selected to represent my school or class in debates, in drama, in hosting, in all these acts of public communication. Better to find my social group outside school where these languages are recognized and spoken. It would be extremely hard for me to succeed in school,

I have been reading about language battles in schooling systems in different places, eg. the fight for a greater recognition of Ebonics (the African-American variety of English, which combines the words “Ebony” and “Phonics”), and also of Hawaii Creole English in the school curriculum. Taiwan also went through Taiwanisation in the 90s where Taiwanese (a variety of Hokkien) is now taught in schools and it is perfectly legitimate for politicians to use Taiwanese in parliament.

Schools in the US have been experimenting with different forms of bilingualism.

1. submersion model– where students are submerged in the standard language of prestige once they enter school (pretty much the Singaporean model as students are learning all subjects in English except for mother tongue classes)
2. transition model – where the home language is used in classroom settings in the early part of the child’s school life and then phased out to be replaced by the standard language very soon.
3. Maintenance model – where the home language is used with the prestige language in classroom instruction for a significant period of time.

Some of the findings that are emerging show that the maintenance model is actually quite effective in improving the achievement of minority language speakers across the different subject areas, possibly because these students feel that what they bring to the classroom is recognized and valued.

In other words, the child in the maintenance bilingual program would find it easier to raise his/her hand to ask questions and communicate with their friends and teachers if their languages are authorized in the classroom environment.

So, I think that given the situation that the income disparity in Singapore is ever-increasing, it is important in education think about structures and systems that can help underachieving kids connect to school better.

My dream is to see the Ministry of Education experiment with a few schools using the maintenance bilingual model to see what happens. These seems like a radical idea – what if it becomes perfectly fine to communicate in Singlish in classrooms or a hybrid form of Hokkien or Malay? Would that help the achievement of students who don’t traditionally do well in schools? What if TV started broadcasting inter-school debates in Singlish, would a different group of people start becoming the “stars” of their schools? Not only the sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers but also the sons and daughters of contractors and hawkers?

Listen to this podcast on WNYC about a school in Flushing Queens in New York which serves a very international immigrant population. They speak many different languages in the school in order that these different students feel welcomed in the school.

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