Unexpected and (unwanted?) outcome

When I was in the primary school in the 1960s, there were about one-third of students in Singapore enrolled in Chinese stream schools. In the 1980s, all primary and secondary schools were in English stream and offered mother tongue teaching as a second language. After one generation and more than a quarter century, we have achieved our goal to make English the common language among Singaporeans, especially the younger generation.

We are now in a situation that all young Singaporean students are studying English as our first language. Children, growing up in an English alike mother tongue environment, will naturally regard English as their mother tongue. This helps to create and promote nationhood and common identity. In addition, it also does away the disadvantaged group who cannot command English. Hence, to many students mother tongue becomes an alien and a stranger foreign language. This is an expected outcome and we happily accept and welcome it.

We have no more students learning our mother tongue as a first language and we also do not have an education system that offers students to study in a Chinese or mother tongue stream school.

Just when we think we can do away with this language issue. And we want to move forward to become an English speaking country; some unexpected and unwanted outcomes quietly arrive even without our notice.

Our economic development requires a huge importation of foreign talents and workers. These new migrants from China, India and other countries are educated in their home countries and certainly do not learn English as their mother tongue or never regard English as their mother tongue.

So, on the one hand, locally, we do not produce students who study mother tongue as our first language. The mastery of mother tongue is weak among local students. On the other hand, new migrants have a better command of their mother tongues and relatively weak in English. As a result, we provide English training to them and want them to improve their English to match our language environment and requirement.

Our schools and institutions of higher learning have a sizable number of foreign students. These students’ mother tongues are not English and most likely are Chinese, Indian sub-continent or Southeast Asian languages. A lot of them will become residents of Singapore and their proficiency in mother tongues will remain with them.

In fact, we want them to remain proficient in their mother tongues as these are needed for Singapore external economic development. Our educational system has difficulty in producing enough bilingual workers to be posted overseas to take up the jobs created by Singapore companies. We, therefore, have this unexpected outcome.

Singapore is too small to change the world. Since independence, we work so hard to provide English learning as our priority and we nearly achieve it. However, the non-English speaking world is also making unexpected changes or changes that we don’t want to see or fail to anticipate.

Perhaps, it is a fate and turns us back to square one.