THE REFORM OF CHINESE LANGUAGE TEACHING IN SINGAPORE PRIMARY SCHOOLS 1974 - 1984 : A CASE STUDY IN LANGUAGE PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTATION

Abstract

In Singapore, a pluralistic model of bilingualism has been promoted as the language policy by the Government. Concerted efforts have been made to produce effectively bilingual school graduates to achieve this goal. Every child in Singapore has to learn two official languages (i.e. English plus own ethnic language) concurrently when he begins formal schooling at primary one. In the 70s, the two school languages were usually not the mother tongues for the majority of the Chinese children. It was therefore necessary to find a way to reduce their workload on the one hand and to ensure that the desired level of proficiency in both languages was attained on the other. The "Chinese Language Instructional Materials for Primary Schools" (CLIPS) project was designed to help the Chinese pupils to learn the Chinese language in a less painful way within the limited instructional time. CLIPS has been considered as a successful project. It is a concrete example of Rubin's ideal model of language planning. This research discusses the fact finding, the planning, the implementation and the evaluation of CLIPS. It also uncovers the possible factors and the techniques which have led to the success of the project at the nation-wide level.