Singapore’s failed attempt at bilingualism

Singapore’s bilingual education policy was introduced in 1966, making it compulsory for students to study their mother tongues in primary and secondary school. I think that the forcing of a second language takes away the passion and the drive from us to learn the language and turns it into just another thing on our to do list.

Firstly, can Singaporeans really be considered bilingual if we do not have a very strong grasp of either languages – both our primary language and our mother tongue? Most Singaporeans speak a modified version of their mother tongue, not being able to fully comprehend the language. Singaporeans fail to use their mother tongues in their daily lives. In 2013, the Minister of state said that more Singaporeans are speaking English rather than their mother tongues at home. When we do not practice a language enough, fluency is unattainable.

Many Singaporeans do not feel inclined to communicate in their mother tongues and in fact find learning it to be a burden. A paper done by a Univeristy hnors student reported that most people interviewed said they only wanted to improve their Chinese to get good grades rather than to be able to communicate fluently or because they have the passion and drive to do so.

Interest leads to a more concerted effort to want to improve.

Secondly, Singapore should focus on improving its English proficiency before delving into a second language. The fact that Singapore still has their “Speak Good English” campaigns is enough to let us know that our level of English is not up to par yet and there is still a long way to go. It is more important to ensure everyone in Singapore is able to properly communicate in one language first before trying to introduce a second language into the mix. By forcing students to juggle both languages, it has resulted in substandard performances of both languages, which is clearly undesirable.

Thirdly, if one of the goals of the bilingual language policy is to build cultural bonds and allow us to communicate with our family members, why has the language policy forgotten about dialects? In 2015 it was found that more than 20% of residents speak in dialects at home rather than Chinese or traditional Malay. Thus, the bilingual language policy has failed to effectively achieve the goal of allowing us to communicate with the older generations. It is quite a common thing to find that most of the elderly in Singapore in fact only understand their dialects such as Hokkien or Cantonese and are not too comfortable with Mainland Chinese.

There is only a small minority of people speaking their mother tongues at home. This further drives the point that the language is not being practiced enough for us to be considered fluent and suggests that the education system is not sufficient in promoting such bilingualism. On top of that, the lack of interest will further add to the lack of practice – and these are issues that the forced learning in schools cannot fix for us.

In conclusion, the implementation of a compulsory mother tongue course throughout our education is ineffective and should either be modified or abolished. The current syllabus and implementation of the course is not sufficient to fully encapsulate the complexity of the language and enable people to be fluent in the language.