By Elizabeth Weise

When talking about Mandarin education, Singapore makes for an interesting study. While the nation’s schools are all taught in English, about three-quarters of all students must become fluent in Mandarin in order to graduate.

I recently spoke with Dr. Chin CheeKuen, who is executive director of the Singapore Centre for Chinese Language at Nanyang Technological University. He explained to me how their school system is structured and how students learn Mandarin there.

“Singapore is quite different from the rest of the world because we make the learning of Mandarin compulsory” for all students with Chinese heritage, says Dr. Chin. The goal is to create “bilingual citizens of the world.” In the past only the most capable people, who were able to master two languages, truly became bilingual. Now it’s simple “part of life” and necessary for the 21^st century. Singapore has built its educational system around insuring that its students are ready for that future, he says

Singapore is an island national situated between Malaysia and Indonesia, about 3.5 times as big as Washington D.C. It became an independent country in 1965. The population is 5.26 million, 74.1% of Chinese descent, 13.4% of Malay decent and 9.2% of Indian descent. Eurasians and other groups make up 3.3%. One of the Asian Tigers, today it has the third highest per capita income in the world.

Singapore’s educational system is considered one of the world’s best. Its students consistently score at the very top of international measures of science and math ability.

It was founded as an English trading colony in 1819, which is why English is one of its official languages and why all schools are taught in English. The nation has four official languages, based on the main language communities of the island: English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil.  All children are enrolled in a ‘mother tongue’ strand within the school system depending on their ethnicity. This language remains one of their core subjects as they move through school. About 72%-75% of students are in the Chinese strand, 12%-15% in the Malay strand and 10% in the Tamil or other minorities’ language strand.

But just because students come from ethnically Chinese families does not mean that they speak Mandarin. Among Chinese families, 37% speak only or mainly Mandarin at home, 25% speak both Mandarin and English at home and 38% speak only or mainly English.  The use of Mandarin as a home language is declining in Singapore as English slowly supplants it, Dr. Chin said.

The Singapore school year runs for 40 weeks and the school day goes from 7:30 to 1:30. Most students do extra-curricular activities or special projects at school after the academic day ends, or attend remedial lessons where they do more studying. Singapore schools embrace tracking. Students are tested and assigned to a top, mainstream or vocational track according to their academic ability.

All subjects but the mother tongue are taught in English, so up to 90% of the day is in English and the rest is language arts for in Chinese, Malay or Tamil depending on the student’s background. In Chinese, students get more Mandarin time in elementary school and then the level drops slights as other subjects are emphasized. The Chinese language times for students in the mainstream program for elementary school from first through sixth grade varies between at 6.5 and 4 hours a week of Mandarin depending on their grade.

In secondary school, the U.S. equivalent of middle and high school, students in the mainstream program study Chinese 3.75 hours a week.  There is also a track for students who have done very well in Chinese or who are very interested in pursuing Chinese studies. These students get extra Chinese time for a total of 4.25 hours per week.

Singapore has its own national examinations which are taken at the end of grade 6, grade 10 or 11 and grade 12 or 13. Chinese language is one of the compulsory subjects for all Chinese students in these examinations. Students in the Chinese track in middle school need to pass a Mandarin test in the General Certificate of Education (GCE) ‘O’ (Ordinary) Level examination in order to enroll in high school. They must also pass a Chinese test to get their ‘A’ (Advanced) level certificate to attend local universities.

How good their Chinese is depends on their interest and how hard they work. It’s impossible to directly compare their Mandarin ability with either Chinese and Taiwanese students on the one hand and American immersion students on the other, says Dr. Chin.  But students who truly apply themselves are able to enter Beijing University in China. “We have some students who their Mandarin standard is really comparable to mainland China. We have some families who do not speak Chinese at home and I think they are learning the language from the ground up” so the level they reach is not at high in general, Dr. Chin says. And some speak it very well. As in all schools “there’s a big difference here between individuals”

However all students must pass the Chinese language at (GCE) A Level examination to be able to enter university in Singapore. This makes students and parents “take learning of Mandarin in school seriously,” says Dr. Chin.

Read-First-Write-Later

Singapore has been a leader of the read-first-write-later strategy of Chinese education. Students are expected to read and recognize more characters than they are able to write. This allows them to read most complicated material more quickly. A distinction is made between the number of characters students must be able to read and recognize and characters students must ‘master,’ i.e. be able to read and write.

By the end of second grade, students will have learned between 600 and 650 characters, 300 to 350 of which they must be able to write. By the end of fourth grade they must know between 1,200 to 1,300 characters, including 700 to 750 they must master. By end of grade 6 they know between 1,600 and 1,700 characters, of which they must have mastered between 1,000 and 1,100. By the time they take their O Level Examination when they’re 15 or 16, they will have mastered between 2,400 and 2,500 characters, 2,000 to 2,100 of which they must be able to write.

However despite this, most students still read for pleasure in English, which they’re more comfortable, but that depends on their family and the student themselves, says Dr. Chin.

The Mandarin taught in Singapore’s schools is very close to standard Beijing Mandarin and simplified characters are used. In Singapore it’s called 新加坡华语, Xīnjiāpō Huáyǔor Singaporean Mandarin. The Mandarin spoken on the street is called Colloquial Singaporean Mandarin and contains loan words from Malay and Chinese dialects also spoken in Singapore. It is quite natural for people in Singapore who “tend to mix up the vocabulary between Mandarin and English. They might say a Mandarin sentence but have an English or Malay word,” Dr. Chin says. However, under formal settings like meeting China or Taiwan counterparts or attending cultural or official events when Chinese is the main or one of the main languages, good Mandarin will be used.

Singapore doesn’t have actual immersion classes in elementary school, but some preschools are beginning to experiment with the idea. As families shift to speaking English rather than Chinese at home, immersion programs are seen as helpful to introducing children to the language they will study in school.

The Chinese textbook series used in Singapore schools is called华文, Huáwén,  Chinese Language for Primary Schools or Chinese Language for Secondary Schools. It is also used by the Portland Public Schools Mandarin immersion program.

So should we all just move to Singapore? Maybe not. I asked an American mother whose job took her family to Singapore when her daughter was still a toddler to tell me about their experiences. She found that while there were many excellent aspects to the experience, there was quite a bit of downside, too.

Her daughter began learning Mandarin at a bilingual preschool when she was two-and-a-half. When it came time to start first grade, her Chinese was good enough for entry in the neighborhood primary school’s Mandarin track. She attended Raffles Girls Primary School, which was one of the better public schools in the city-state.

She did well in her course work during her six years in Singapore, thanks to extra tutoring, and thrived in the structured environment of the school system. When the family moved arrived back in the United States for seventh grade, her daughter was able to get a place at a the Mandarin immersion school in San Francisco and has had no trouble keeping up.

The schools had well-funded music and sports programs. Intellectualism was encouraged and all children got to participate in a variety of activities as part of their school day. “The biggest benefit of life in Singapore was the experience of living abroad — meeting new people, having new experiences, etc.,” the mother said of their time there.

Still, there is no magic bullet to creating the Perfect School – even in the city-state. Despite identical government funding and curriculum, students who attend schools in the wealthier districts tend to outperform those in the less affluent.  .

“Even if the Singapore government doubled or tripled funding for low-performing schools, I bet children in the wealthier neighborhoods would still get better test scores,” the American mom said.

Children from rich families have access to expensive, high-quality tutoring to supplement their education and are better able to transport their children to study centers, über-competitive parents also gain status from their child’s school placement and exam scores, she said. The family is motivated for the child to excel.

The test scores touted internationally refer to students in the most academically demanding courses, many of whom have been nurtured since pre-K by academically-minded families. Sixth-grade students take an especially grueling test that determines what type of secondary school they will enter. According to the Ministry of Education, last year’s scores saw kids going to: advanced (62%); academic (23.1%); technical (11.4%) or vocational (2.6%) secondary schools.

Many Singaporean school children struggle with spoken English even though much of the curriculum is taught in English. Teachers throughout the city-state speak a pidgin version of the language known as Singlish and writing assignments often reflect a lack of proper sentence structure. The government’s “Speak Good English” campaign did little to encourage fluency.

The pressures put on students in high-performing schools in Singapore are ones that many American parents might find unreasonable or even damaging.

The American mom said her daughter scored 94.5 in English, 95.0 in Chinese and 87.0 in Math on her first report card. The teacher wrote at the bottom that the student “needs to be more meticulous so as to attain better results.”

The grading curve in Singapore is 85-100 for “Band One” so her daughter’s grades were the equivalent of straight As. “I don’t know about other parents, but that means ice cream sundaes for all at my house,” the mom said.

Unreasonably Rigid?

The school system can also seem unreasonably rigid. Singapore’s school year runs on a calendar year and kicks off Jan 2. Everyone born in 1999, for instance, is in the same grade and expected to be at the same level.

Brutal mid-terms are given at the beginning of May. They often contain new material that won’t be introduced until the second-term, if at all. When the American mom asked about this, the teacher responded “We like to challenge them.” Bad grades for the mid-term often mean students spend their four-week break in June studying.

Finals occur in October and there’s a week off before when kids are expected to cram with their private tutors. All extra-curricular activities are suspended in September/October. It is not a very joyful time. After finals, the students do nothing until the year ends in mid-November. The American mom’s take-home: They may have a longer school year, but they’re not maximizing learning.

Each class has 30 or more kids. Her daughter’s sixth-grade math class had 42. “Her teachers didn’t cover all that much in the classroom and the homework load was often freakishly light because the teachers assumed kids got assignments from tutors.

According to the American mom, “the No. 1 difference between Singapore’s education system and that of the U.S. is the expectation that children will have hours of private tutoring every week. And it’s not cheap.

“Teachers often moonlight as tutors. Our Chinese tutor was an `education mother’ from the Mainland. She accompanied her brilliant daughter who was on a scholarship. The tutor came two times a week for 90 minutes. She charged 45 Singapore dollars per hour ($37 US). Starting from fourth grade, my daughter had a math/science `homework helper’ for two hours every Sunday morning.”

Rote memorization is often prized over true learning:

The first time my daughter asked me to help her study for an English spelling test I was impressed with the vocabulary. But guess what? The kids weren’t expected to know what the words meant – only to spell them! I asked the teacher about this and she gave me a blank stare. She then told me I could teach my daughter the meanings if I wanted to, but because it’s a spelling test, she only needed to spell the words.

My daughter was once asked to read a composition about orangutans and then fill in a worksheet.

First question: How tall is an orangutan?

She parroted what was in the composition, which was around 1.4 meters or so. I asked her – what’s a meter? How tall are you? She had no idea so I got out a measuring tape. It turned out an orangutan was about the same size as my daughter, so she added that into her answer.

Another question: How long does an orangutan stay with its mother? The answer was six years, which was a year younger than my daughter at the time. She wrote “Six years” and added “I’m seven and I’m not ready to leave my mother yet!”

The teacher handed back the assignment and crossed out my daughter’s added comments, writing “Irrelevant” in red pen. I mentioned this to the principal. “Oh well,” she said.

My daughter failed her science midterm one year. Most of her class failed it. Einstein might have failed it. The teacher was incompetent and they learned nothing. Instead of conducting a simple experiment in front of the class, the teacher showed a YouTube video of it. Guess what was needed to do the experiment? A bowl of water, a plastic cup and some cotton.

Because of the massive failure, the school offered a “remedial” class given by local high-school students. It was so fun and hands-on that parents of the kids who passed called to complain that their kids were being punished by the exclusion. My daughter aced the final. Happy ending!

Overall, the American mom says, the experience was a good one. Since moving

back to the U.S., her daughter’s English has gotten better and her Mandarin worse, as would be expected moving from a Chinese-speaking to an English-speaking country.

Still, don’t believe all the hype: Singapore isn’t an educational paradise. Perhaps nowhere is.

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From the Asia Society

The Basics of Chinese Immersion Program Design

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(Dean Mitchell/istockphoto)

by Myriam Met and Chris Livaccari

Designing a language immersion program requires a level of commitment on the part of the administration, teachers, students, and parents that is far beyond that of many other types of instructional programs. In making the decision of whether and how to begin an immersion program, it is critical to consider a number of key questions and to clarify the purposes and goals of the program, the student population who will be served, and how the program aligns with other programs within the school or school district. While there are many cognitive and academic advantages to providing students with a rigorous and engaging immersion curriculum, it is crucial to design the appropriate type of program that best meets the needs of students, parents, and the school community.

More here.

From the Asia Society Chinese Language Initiatives newsletter.

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