PM Lee's Remarks at the Press Conference on Mother Tongue Language on 11 May 2010 at Istana

I called this morning’s press conference to explain the Government’s thinking on the question of the mother tongue language or as MOE calls it “MTL”. 

Let me first outline my key points before I explain the background and what this issue is about and what the way forward is. The first point is – Mother Tongue remains crucial.  It is the foundation of our educational system, has been for many years and will continue to be, and we have no intentions of changing that.

Secondly, we are not reducing the weight of Mother Tongue languages at PSLE.  I put that directly to address a lot of concerns that have arisen. That is not going to change but there are things we have to do to the examinations and to the teaching of mother tongue.  We have to update the curriculum, we have to update the teaching, we have to update the examining of Mother Tongue languages because our language environment in Singapore is changing and we have to adapt to that.  We have to fit the diverse backgrounds and aptitudes of our students in schools.  That means we have to customize our content and it means we need more resources for Mother Tongue and particularly, it will mean we need more Mother Tongue teachers.

How we are going to do this is still work-in-progress.  MOE is reviewing the teaching of MTL.  We have set up a Committee chaired by Ho Peng (Director-General for Education) and they are in their preliminary stages of their work, studying the different methodologies which other countries and other systems have used and tried out for teaching languages.  I think they have got some ideas but they will need some time to come up with specific recommendations on the way forward.

So that is where we stand.  Mother Tongue is the cornerstone, the weightage is not going to be reduced but the teaching and examination will have to change and improve. MOE is working on it and it will take some time.

This issue became hot after Minister Ng Eng Hen gave a media interview about 3 weeks ago. It created fears that the Government was reducing emphasis on the Mother Tongues in schools and particularly beyond that, that it was really lowering the status of the Mother Tongues in our society.  Today Minister Ng and I will outline the Government’s policies and plans for Mother Tongue languages so that the public and especially the parents and students know where the Government stands and where we are going on this. 

I see a positive side in the public responses.  There has been agitation and there has been fear and I think we need to calm this down.  But there has also been strong support for the Mother Tongues languages which in fact reflects the success of our bilingual policy.

Had it not been for the bilingual policy producing a whole new generation of Singaporeans who are competent in and proud of their Mother Tongues, I do not think we would have had this reaction.  And the government shares the same goals as many of those who has spoken up – to maintain a strong emphasis on Mother Tongue languages, to keep our bilingualism alive and ultimately to create the best environment to give our students and our children the best headstart in life. 

How to do that we have to discuss carefully and there can be different views but I think as overall objectives, we share those.  Our system for teaching Mother Tongue is not perfect.  We would not claim it so, we have worked hard at it but it still has many issues. But I think to be fair we have upgraded, updated and improved it significantly over the years and repeatedly over the years.  People say too often but we have done reviews every few years. I chaired one in 1999 and MM was personally involved in one about 5 years later and now we are talking about a review again.  The changes come quick because when we are talking about education, 5 years is not a long time.  First you have got to have the ideas, the concepts, the directions, then you get the materials and you train your teachers, then your teachers implement it, then gradually year to year the students progress and finally many years later, maybe after all the officials who have started this have retired, then the students start to take examinations – PSLE, O levels and so on.  Therefore 5 years is actually very fast because before the last one has finished, the next one has already begun.  But it is necessary to do this because our environment is changing quite rapidly and we have to keep on looking ahead so that we stay ahead of the curve and abreast of the situation.  It puts a very heavy load on our teachers, on the systems. I would give full credit to them for the great efforts which they have made in understanding what we are trying to do, in doing a very difficult job in the schools and in the education ministry, and I would say significantly improving the way Mother Tongue has been taught in the schools.  Had we not made all those changes over the years, I think today we would already be in a very serious jam.  We have made the changes, the teachers have tried their very best to adapt. I have seen what they have done to try to be creative, to try and be innovative, to try and make the materials interesting and fun, to engage the students.  I think that while it is still hard work, it has made a big difference. 

But we have to keep on adapting and building on what we have achieved.  Why? First of all because the language environment is changing among our population and changing very rapidly. Already amongst the Chinese, the majority of parents of Primary One students are predominantly English speaking at home.  For Malay and Indian parents, the proportions are lower, but similarly growing.  But also because there is new research and new thinking around the world, discovering better ways to teach languages, better ways to learn languages.  We have to make the most of these new ideas and adapt them, incorporate them into our systems.  We cannot copy them because our requirements are different, our society is different.  You are learning a language which is not a foreign language but a language which is alive in our society and we are trying to keep it alive in our society.  But I think there is a lot we can learn from the way people are teaching, are examining languages, are bringing students to successively higher standards of proficiencies and we should take full advantage of that.

Thirdly, of course, IT changes a lot of things and including the teaching, learning and testing of languages.  It is happening everywhere in the world, even in China and it is not just a matter of using a ball pen (stylus) instead of using a Chinese brush.  People go on the keyboard and have all kinds of new ways to type in words and for expressing themselves.  They use the language in different ways.  They do not write long letters, they write emails, they have SMSes in highly informal language, all sorts of strange colloquialisms and abbreviations which purists frown upon and which probably is not a good thing to learn if you are learning the language and you want to get the proper form.  But you have to know that this is the environment and we have to teach the students cognizant of this environment because that is how they are going to use the language. And that is how we should prepare them so that what is learnt in class is relevant to what they will use the languages for in life after they leave school or even while they are in school in their social lives and at home.

We are carefully considering how these trends will affect MTL teaching and we need to start thinking about the next phase now so that in 5 or 10 years time, we will be ready with changes, beginning to implement changes that will keep Mother Tongue relevant to this new situation.   We place a lot of importance on this because Mother Tongue is not only core to the education system but to our conception of what kind of society we are, what sort of ethos pervades Singapore, who we think we are.  We are not just people who came from other space who have learnt English but we have histories, we have heritages, we have identities. We have adapted to the modern world and we are working with English but Mother Tongue is an important part of us which defines us and at the same time links us to the world we live in – Asia, India, China, Southeast Asia.  It places us so that we are centred so that we do not feel that we are always off balance and a slightly second-class copy of somebody else.  We are ourselves, proud of it.

And so it is not just a matter for MOE.  This February, a couple of months ago, we had a major meeting here – MM, myself, Minister Ng, all the ministers in MOE and all the key officials in MOE concerned with Mother Tongue teaching – for Chinese, for Malay, for Tamil, 50-odd in all.  We spent about 2 hours and had a very intense and useful discussion.  The Ministers, MM and I particularly wanted to explain why we felt this was important, why we needed to change and update the teaching of the language, what our objectives are and how we could help the teachers and education ministry officials to do their work better and make this a success.  And at the same time we also wanted to talk to the officials in the ministries, the supervisors of the schools, the principals – both from the SAP schools, as well as a few from the schools where there are a lot of children with difficulty learning Mother Tongue, to understand what their challenges were and what their difficulties were, where they felt that they have been successful and what the way forward was.

But it does not stop with a meeting. The Ministry has appointed a committee and the Director-General of Education is chairing it, to deliberate this very seriously.  They are still in their early stages but they have come up with two significant inter-related ideas which I think will guide the direction forward.

One, the idea of differentiated teaching.  That means to differentiate the teaching more, to adapt your approach and content to the different backgrounds and different learning aptitudes of the children.  If the child speaks Mother Tongue at home or socially day-by-day, you can take one approach teaching him because he already has the concept of what the sounds are, the grammar, the way the language is used. You have to formalize it – he may need to learn to write, to learn the grammar more properly, to learn the more of the formal language, the idioms which might not occur so commonly in daily life.  But the framework is already there.

On the other hand if he is coming to the language more from scratch which some proportions of our students do, in all languages – Chinese, Malay as well as Tamil – then you have to understand what his background is and use his background in order to bridge the gap and teach the language which he is learning more as a second language than as a Mother Tongue.  I think that if you use the same approach for both groups of students, you are going to have a problem and if you do not distinguish between students who are strong in language abilities and those students who are weak in language abilities, you are also going to have a problem. So the first thrust which we believe will be necessary is to differentiate the teaching and the learning of the language. 

The second thrust which is related to this is to teach and to test based on proficiency levels.  What do we mean by proficiency levels?  To define clearly and in detail levels of attainments that you can verify the students have reached.  For example, can he communicate simply and directly on familiar daily topics?  If he can chat with you and discuss where he went for breakfast, whether he came to school on time, what he is wearing, what his parents or sisters are doing – that is one level and you can ascertain that. 

Another level might be the ability to read newspapers and magazine articles and understand them.  You can verify that.  It is a well defined proficiency level. 

Another level may be the ability to express himself fluently in writing and in speech.  It could be an imformal presentation, or a formal speech to write and present – that is another higher standard.  If we can define more of these proficiency levels, then I think we can get our students to go from level to level and jump from one step to the next, instead of trying to do one high jump to the top, and if he didn’t quite hit the bar and crashed somewhere down then I only give him 45 marks for good effort.  But actually he did not get anywhere. But if I have steps to get all the way there, and I know he made the first, second and third step, the fourth step maybe not quite, then there is proficiency which is verified and there is achievement from the kid who say, yes, I know I am getting somewhere and this is something that I am able to attain.  I did not get full marks, which is the highest level that people want but I am getting somewhere and it is not a hopeless waste of time. 

We have not worked out the details but I think the approach which is needed is quite clear. We have to cater to a varied student population, we have to develop different material for the different proficiency levels and abilities of the students, and if we want to do all these good things, (I can just hear the teachers listening to me, thinking this to themselves now) then we need to provide more resources and particularly we have to provide more teachers.  We have to recruit, train and produce more teachers so that we can have smaller classes, we can have more personal attention to the students, more interaction in class.  If you have 40 students learning language in class, it is not possible for all of them to be practising and to be getting attention from the teacher, correcting them, suggesting to them better ways of putting it, helping them when they stumble over a new word or to find a new word. 

If you want to do all these good things, you have to find resources, more teachers and we will do that. We cannot do it overnight but it is something that we intend to do.  We will invest more because we believe in the importance of the Mother Tongue lauguages.

Of course, after the teaching, it has to follow through to the examining and the exams have to support this new way of teaching the languages. Because otherwise whatever you may say about enrichment, about culture, about fun, about activities, about going beyond the curriculum, when it comes close to the exams, that means 2 or 3 years from now (P3 and certainly P4) the parents, the children and the  teachers will all zero in on exams - better memorize this list, I have summarized this, this is what has been asked in the last ten exams and if you master this, with some luck, some questions will come out and you may score an extra half mark.  I think you have to study and focus on exams but to overly obsess on it the way some students are doing and I think our system does not really discourage them from doing, that can be counter-productive to the broader objectives of learning and mastering the language that we are after.  That is why we have to go through to talk about exams and that is why when Minister Ng met the press he discussed exams which led to this issue. We have adjusted the exam format over the years, we have increased the oral component of the exams but basically the structure has remained more or less the same. In the next phase we have to go beyond these incremental changes to look critically at the examination and the grading system.  How to test for proficiency, this idea of going from step to step? How to incentivize students to make the effort to get to the next step and how to grade their achievements fairly?

The concerns came about because of the issue of PSLE scoring.  Minister Ng has said “MTL marks count for so much in the PSLE” and some concluded we want to reduce the weighting but we are not reducing the weighting.  This would send the wrong signal that we are downgrading Mother Tongue as a lot of the people who have spoken up have said.  But it also is probably not the best way to solve the problem.  Certainly it would not be efficient in helping the student to reach the level that we would like them to reach.  Nevertheless we do need to change the way in which we examine and grade students in order to dovetail with the other changes we plan to make.

This new approach that we have in mind will benefit all the students.  There is no way around making the effort to learn a language.  Learning a language always takes an effort, learning a second language takes more effort and especially if your second language and main language are very different, like English and Chinese or English and Tamil, a bit less so for English and Malay, then it takes a lot of sweat.  There is no way around that, the students have to put in the effort and we would like the parents to encourage and to help them.  But the approach we are taking will help us in this effort because differentiated teaching will enable us to teach each student in the most appropriate way according to his ability and enable him to learn according to his ability, and setting proficiency levels will give students progressive, successive, achievable targets to aim for. 

The better students can go forward and be awarded for their achievements and the weaker students can progress to as far as their abilities will allow, reach a meaningful proficiency level and get appropriate credit for what they have accomplished.  So in essence, we cannot have a one size fits all model.  We have to consider this new approach not just as a brilliant idea, but we have to look at it overall, systemically from an educational point of view.  How do we make a system work with these principal considerations.  From the principal considerations to the system is an enormous amount of detailed work, experimenting, trial, preparation.  So we have to give the Director-General of Education’s committee time to do a proper job.  They should have some progress to report in a few months, but beyond that, implementing the curriculum and the exams structure will of course take longer – years rather than months. 

Let me wind up by just saying that one of the things this debate has shown is that many young parents want their children to do well in Mother Tongue.  They want their children to retain their cultural heritage, they want to respond to the rise of China and India as well as the links between Singapore and our immediate neighbours in Southeast Asia, particularly in Malaysia and Indonesia.  But at the same time the parents also want the teaching and learning of Mother Tongue languages to improve.  So it is not that the status quo is fine.  They want teaching to be more directly relevant to their daily lives, they want to capture the interests of the students and they want to use the best educational technologies available, so that the students can be self motivated to achieve the highest possible proficiency in Mother Tongue languages and make the best use of their time which they spend learning Mother Tongue languages.  And I think these are positive attitudes which auger well for the learning of MTL and for keeping ours an Asian society.