Clarissa Oon's article yesterday, 'English home, Chinese class', continued the all-important Mother Tongue discussion, surely another discussion which requires a great deal of common sense (among other things).
Some of her main points:
1. '... from my experience, and that of a few friends, the fact that we spoke almost entirely English at home was no obstacle at all to liking Chinese in school and becoming reasonably proficient in it.'
2. '... one should not be overly swayed by statistics showing changing linguistic dynamics at home.'
3. 'Further tweaks to the system could inadvertently lower the bar in Chinese-language proficiency for the average Chinese Singaporean student...'
Like Ms Oon, I learnt to write my Chinese name only when I went to Primary 1. Like her too, I spoke practically nothing but English at home. And also like her, while I did not exactly have an easy time with Mandarin, I came to enjoy and appreciate it in school. As I have said before, this fortuitous development was largely due to my teachers. Unlike her, however, I did not excel in it (though I didn't do badly :-)). Ms Oon wrote that she went to a SAP school and later in life, was the ST correspondent in Beijing.
So the theory that coming from an English-speaking home creates insurmountable barriers to Mandarin-learning does not always hold true.
I am not sure I am reading correctly between the lines, but I seem to see an argument that the 'family background' variable is overplayed. If that is the argument, I agree with her.
Furthermore, may I point out that in our time, if someone came from a 'Chinese-speaking home', the 'Chinese' spoken was very likely dialect and not Mandarin. Coming from a 'Chinese-speaking' home does not necessarily mean you will be good in Mandarin.
Based on this theory of my own devising, and using observations (also of my own devising) of one child's (my own) dialect-Mandarin performance, here are my conclusions. Dialect-speaking fluency does not necessarily translate into having no problems learning Mandarin. There are some who will have no problems with the transfer and so on. Such as my husband, who grew up speaking dialect and reading Chinese newspapers (because there were no English ones to read). He effortlessly scored well in Mandarin (unlike me, who worked hard to get the scores I got).
Unlike him too, the boy very often does not realise that "x" in dialect is "X" in Mandarin, unless you point it out to him. When he first learnt Mandarin, he was not able to 'effortlessly' transfer the dialect sentence or phrase constructions that could be used similarly in Mandarin.
Of course, it could be argued that, strictly speaking, the boy doesn't come from a 'Chinese-speaking' home. Perhaps he can be considered a kid from an English-speaking home who had dialect as his second language and Mandarin as his third. Hence, maybe I need to devise another theory.
Let me think about it...
Meanwhile, since the in thing is 'language spoken at home', let me get back to it and point out that, while more children now are from 'English-speaking' homes, their parents are very likely 'bilingual' because they (we) went through a 'bilingual' education. This is very different from the 'English-speaking' homes of our days, when many of our parents did not know Mandarin.
So, if people are studying the home language issue, I hope they do look at it as it should be looked.
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