Mandarin literacy

How can a corpus help us understand what’s happening to Mandarin literacy?

Article highlights:

What’s happening to Chinese Singaporean preschool children’s oral Mandarin?

How can a corpus help?

What can teachers do?


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SingTeach: new issue
at

http://singteach.nie.edu.sg/language-ed.html

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How can a corpus help us understand what’s happening to Mandarin literacy?
full text of the article is available at http://singteach.nie.edu.sg/language-ed.html

The following is what I extracted from the article:


Battle of the tongues

Mandarin, Malay and Tamil: in Singapore, these are considered the official “mother tongue” languages. However, as the languages spoken at home change over the years, so too have children’s “real” mother tongue.

Though these languages are cherished for their ethnic heritage, this may not be enough to save them against a gradual loss of prestige in the face of the growing influence of English.

...


The Case for Mandarin

In 2004, the Chinese Language Curriculum and Pedagogy Review Committee (CLCPRC) found that the use of English as the primary home language among Chinese Singaporeans is now equal to and will soon surpass that of Mandarin.

The committee concluded that there are now two major distinct groups of Chinese Singaporean children, with very different home language backgrounds, now learning Mandarin in schools:

1. those from English-speaking families (ESF), and

2. those from Chinese-speaking families (CSF).

...

The Corpus: Language in Real Life

This is where the Singapore Preschoolers’ Mandarin Chinese Corpus comes in.

A corpus (plural: corpora) is a large collection of texts, whether spoken or written, stored electronically. They are used to analyze how language is used in real life.

For more information on this, check out:Cambridge International Corpus: What is a Corpus?AskOxford: What is a Corpus?

Using this corpus, lists of Mandarin words spoken by Chinese Singaporean preschoolers have been generated. The corpus has helped us find out:

what preschoolers like to say,
when they say it, and
how they say it.

...

to highlight the implications for Chinese language classroom pedagogy and teacher education programmes.


What can Teachers do about It

Declining levels of Mandarin usage at home
= declining competence in children’s oral Mandarin (especially at the preschool level)
= increasing need for teachers to work hard at improving their pupils’ standards of Mandarin

Furthermore, language is not a zero sum game. A decline in the use of Mandarin will not automatically lead to an improvement in Chinese Singaporean children’s use of English.

In the study, it was revealed that most parents who claimed to interact in English with their children at home are, by their own admission, not very good English speakers.

This discrepancy between the actual proficiency of these parents’ spoken English and their desire to introduce English to their children in daily communication would result inevitably in them using Singlish or a mixture of English and Mandarin.

Increasing levels of Singlish/non-Standard English usage at home
= declining competence in children’s oral English (especially at the preschool level)
= increasing need for teachers to work hard at improving their pupils’ standards of English

The end result is that the growing influence of English and its use (in a non-standard form) as a home language among Chinese Singaporeans is posing major problems for both English and Mandarin.

It:

1. hinders children’s acquisition of Standard English, which then effects their learning in all other subjects taught in English in school, and

2. prevents them from fully developing their Mandarin competence and appreciating the wealth of cultural knowledge that the language embodies.


The Good News

But all is not lost. This study has also found that there appears to be a continuum of Mandarin competence among preschoolers, rather than a marked distinction between the groups.

This means that in a bilingual and multicultural society like Singapore, ... there are still “more bilinguals than monolinguals”.

Therefore, a mother tongue language, like Mandarin, will never truly die out.

But if it is to play a bigger role in Singapore’s language landscape, then its prestige and value must be increased and actively promoted – whether in school or at home.

And, to help our students improve their language competence – whether in English or in Mandarin – we teachers must constantly set the standard which we hope they will follow.

Standard English is a must if we hope to combat the use of non-standard varieties of English at home.

...

For more details, read the full text of the article at http://singteach.nie.edu.sg/language-ed.html