January 2005

Poor quality English in Singapore

    

  

 
My sister teaches French as a foreign language to secondary school pupils with ages ranging from 13 to 17. In Singapore, French is classified as a third language, which means that only those schoolchildren who are bright and doing well in English, their second language and some other subjects, are permitted to add French to their workload. 

Thus, the students she gets tend to be the top 2 or 3 percent of each age cohort. 

"Can you imagine, then," she said to me recently, "how shocked I was that no one in my class of 13-year-olds understood the English verb, to bat." 

"No one among the creme de la creme of our schoolkids had come across that verb before!" 

She was introducing the French word battre, and she tried to get the students to guess its meaning by telling them that the English word, to bat, comes from it. 

Whereupon, nearly everyone in the class thought that battre was a kind of animal. 

She doesn't like to use English in her French class, so she started swinging her arms to suggest a kind of action. She said it wasn't an animal, it wasn't even a noun, but a verb. Alas, that still led nowhere. If not a bat, then what? 

So an exception had to be made. She had to give a clue in English. "It's similar to to hit" 

And that brought on the second shock: some in the class weren't familiar with hit either. 

So she took up something in her hand and started batting something else with it. 

"What am I doing?" she asked, hoping to get some idea what English vocabulary her pupils had. 

At last, their faces bloomed with comprehension. "Beat", some said. "Bit" others said. 

* * * * * 

"Yes, I think it's shocking," I said, agreeing with her. "If they've never seen that word, does it mean they've never read Enid Blyton, which they should have by the time they're 12?" 

"They do multiple-choice assessment exercises," she replied, dryly. 

* * * * * 

It's not just the 13 year-olds. In another class, an older teenager, practising his French, constructed a sentence about going somewhere on the MRT. 

My sister then asked him to explain what he meant by 'MRT'; it's just an acronym and an English one to boot. If you spoke to someone in France, it wouldn't do to merely say 'MRT', as no one would understand. 

The boy thought for a moment, and then said, "train". 

Now, "train" is a very broad concept, but try as she might, my sister couldn't get him to be more specific about his mode of transport. She began to suspect it wasn't because of any difficulty with French -- his wasn't too bad -- but was more due to the fact that he had no idea what other kinds of trains there were in this world and therefore didn't know where to begin to delineate the MRT (our local slang for the metro) from the broader concept of rail-borne transportation. 

To him, metro (which he knew only as MRT) and train were synonymous. It's like asking someone to distinguish 'mother' from 'maternal parent'. 

* * * * *

We were not yet rolling on the tarmac, and there would be a little time to make some commercial announcements before take-off. The Tiger Airways cabin attendant then took up the microphone to introduce a line of souvenirs, among which was an exclusive selection of fra-grAH'n- ses, a word that I had never heard before. The accent was on the much-elongated second syllable and it sounded like bra-DANces. 

I was still bemused by that strange pronunciation, when bad grammar hit. "I let you have more information after airborne." 

She had to pass the microphone to her colleague, as we had begun taxiing, and it was time for the safety demonstration. 

We were told that to undo the seat belt, we had to leaf this catch... and that there were six emergency exzeeds on this aircraft. 

* * * * * 

Seated opposite me in the metro, a middle-aged executive was telling his friend what difficulties he had in his office as he tried to improve productivity and efficiency. Apparently, one of his more difficult subordinates was a young woman who was too often on the phone. 

"I told her, when I work that time, I don't take personal core one." He doesn't take personal calls. 

* * * * *

Then this evening the sitcom Phua Chu Kang was on television. The entire series revolves around a working-class building contractor who speaks Singlish, our local patois. 

In this evening's episode, he was trying very hard to get his son and daughter into a top-grade private school, in the course of which, Phua had to deal with a Caucasian headmistress who spoke a very uppercrust English. 

Sitcom series being what they are, the audience would long have built up empathy for Phua Chu Kang and his highly accented English and fractured sentences. The natural instinct in the audience would therefore be to see the headmistress and her brand of English, complete with well-rounded sentences and mellifluous intonation as much too alien and uppity. 

* * * * * 

These vignettes give you an idea how intractable is the "English problem" in Singapore. 

We have children growing up who spend more time in exam drills than reading, and whose vocabulary ends up quite limited. We have youngsters with very little idea of the wider world and who think that the references and terms we use in Singapore are the references and terms used throughout the world. 

We have huge problems with pronunciation -- in fact, as far as I know, the teaching of English in Singapore does not include the teaching of pronunciation -- due to the infiltration of Chinese and Malay vocalisation sets into English. 

We have even bigger problems with grammar, because people don't read and aren't exposed to good English. Instead, they hear a blend of Chinese, Malay and English grammar, which is etched into their brains as the operating grammar to emulate. 

Not least, we have a tendency to see good English as either quaint, only used by stiff old ladies, or arrogant, only used by those bigheaded ones who think themselves better than their peers. If you don't wish to lose your friends, DON'T speak like an angmoh (local slang for Caucasian). 

* * * * *

 

15 January 2005
Straits Times Forum page

No effort here to speak English well

In late November last year, I was fortunate to return to Singapore as a learner with a very diverse cross-cultural group of postgraduate and research students. We belonged to eight or nine nationalities and our ages ranged from 24 to 60. I was the oldest.

Our project was to investigate cross-cultural and inter-cultural management skills and subsequently use such skills to form strategies for negotiations at different levels of business. We had chosen Singapore as our springboard.

As we got down to work, I was most impressed by the ability of Singaporeans to accept strange people with strange questions. However, I was quite disappointed at the level of spoken English among the public - young people, shop assistants, bus drivers, MRT officials and so on.

No doubt, they could speak and understand English to a reasonable level but there did not seem to be any effort to speak in complete sentences or even speak coherently without the interjection of other dialectal or language words, although I realise it adds colour to the local communicative processes.

Those who did speak in complete sentences spoke really well and it was attributed to their job requirements. I was, however, quite disappointed when, on two occasions at a big shopping centre, I met some school teachers taking their Primary 3 and 4 pupils out on an excursion - the teachers were not speaking to the kids in complete sentences.

The impression left is a seeming disregard of the use of proper spoken English.

In contrast, when I spent two weeks in Shanghai on a business trip - where I had many opportunities to come into contact with students, teachers and those connected with tourism - I found that most of them were putting in a great deal of effort to speak English well, not only in full comprehensible sentences, but also with correct pronunciation, intonation and style.

Now, in all fairness, if I had not been part of a team of learners looking deeper into inter-cultural issues, I might not even have noticed the level of spoken English here and, even if I had, would not have thought any more about it, like during my past visits to Singapore.

When I was growing up in Singapore, we were punished at school each time we spoke improper English or mispronounced a word. So it is most likely that Singaporeans of my vintage would today speak reasonably good English. Regardless of our cultural heritage, we had always made great effort to speak English well.

I have always been proud of having had my initial education in Singapore and proud to say that I learnt how to speak, read and write English in Singapore.

I wonder whether enough is being done in Singapore's schools and colleges to foster the correct use of spoken English. Or has it become less important to speak well?

Richard Teo
Darwin, Australia

 

How this situation came about is too complex a tale for here, not that I even know half of it, but I shall touch briefly on the role played by our politics. 

Up until the 1960s, and even in schools where English was the medium of instruction, no one assumed that the children spoke English as a family language. Consequently, the methods used were those of teaching English as a second language, which meant very careful attention paid to enlarging vocabulary and instilling the rules of grammar. Much time was spent on grammar drills to hone the pupils' skills at things like the future perfect tense, the subjunctive and the fine shades of meaning among similar words. See example at right.

However, in the 1970s, a rapid conversion of all schools into English-medium ones took place, as the government shut down Chinese, Malay and Tamil-medium schools. As demand for English teachers grew, so standards fell. Furthermore, geography, physics or carpentry teachers were also required to use English in their classes, but as these adults were not using English as their first language, it meant that the students would hear broken English from those teachers. 

In addition, the rapid expansion of English-medium education meant that students from families that never used English at home had to use English in school. This was unlike the previous decades when the English-medium schools tended to attract pupils from homes that did speak some English. Just when the task of teaching English became wider and harder, the difficulty of getting teachers who spoke good English became greater. 

At around the same time, the Education ministry experimented with American teaching methods. Those were the days when British prestige had sunk to new lows and even the Sterling Pound had to be bailed out by the IMF. America was the shining example of modernity. These teaching methods involved more listening and speaking than being drilled in grammar rules. 

It was a hopelessly misguided change, for the linguistic background in Singapore was nothing like White middle-class America, where children absorbed English with mother's milk. Learning by immersion and example cannot work if the environment was saturated with bad English. 

(Nowadays, the scales have fallen from our eyes. Every time we see some American write on any bulletin board something like, "What I want to know is whether your expected to tip...." we see living proof that teaching language without grammar drills simply doesn't work.)

Another American idiocy imported into our education system was the multiple-choice test. I myself don't remember any use of multiple-choice testing when it came to English in my schooldays. We had to write long essays. We had to read and re-read dense passages followed by some questions to test our understanding of the text, and those questions had to be answered with a paragraph or two. We had to paraphrase other sentences or condense an entire paragraph into a key sentence to capture the gist of it. We had to pen telegrams in exactly 25 words (which I thought was a useless skill since telegrams were obsolescent, only to discover decades later that I can tap out more concentrated sms messages than most). And we had to transpose sentences into other time frames to test our mastery of tenses, or insert new ideas into an existing sentence by means of additional clauses. 

How multiple choice questions would teach students to do all that with language, I cannot imagine. 

Thus, except for a small minority, the masses picked up, not English, but a corrupted form of it. 

More politics was to come. The annual Speak Mandarin Campaign confused priorities. Together with political campaigns against western "yellow culture", official veneration of Confucianism and emphasis on our "roots", "aping the West" became a liability. It was a small step from here to a general ridicule of people with perfect English and internationally acceptable intonation. 

Meanwhile, the economics-trained technocrats in our government said that Singapore must preserve our competitive advantages vis-à-vis a rising China, and one of them is the fact that we're an English-speaking country. 

Lo! we're now officially an English-speaking country, because the government said so. Therefore, what we speak must be English. If it sounds like English and the government says it's English, it's English. Since we have arrived, why is there a need to make an effort to improve our English? 

It's hardly surprising then that Richard Teo, in his letter to the Straits Times (15 January 2005), said, "there did not seem to be any effort to speak in complete sentences or even speak coherently without the interjection of other dialectal or language words." 

As he concluded, there "is a seeming disregard of the use of proper spoken English." 

Good he left it at spoken English. He'd get a heart attack if he saw the written English we have here! 

© Yawning Bread 

To beat, to hit and to bat

They are not synonymous. True, in their first meanings, all of them involve a swinging, thrusting or similar action of the arm, but of the three, to bat must also involve an instrument held by the hand, while the other two do not necessarily imply holding something. The French battre suggests an instrument that has a flat surface, but the English to bat no longer connotes this property.

Between hit and beat, the former implies a single strike unless it is stated otherwise, as in, "the robber hit the policeman repeatedly", whereas the latter, to beat, tends to suggest a certain repetitiveness, a kind of pummelling. Hit focuses on the discrete strikes, whereas beat describes a violent relationship usually counted by the episodes. 

"The drunkard beat his wife twice today, and hit her a total of 15 times." 

You can also hit something without using an arm. You can drive a car and hit a pedestrian, or fire a rifle and hit the target. 

Beating an egg, hitting an egg and batting an egg are very different things. When beating an egg, there's a rotary prestissimo action using a whisk. If you hit an egg, it implies that you used some other object, e.g. a stone, and threw it to strike the egg as the target.  If you batted an egg, which would be very strange indeed, but if hard-boiled, it might just be possible, then the egg would be more akin to the stone, where instead of being the target, it would be the projectile sent into motion by a stick or a board held in the hand. 

There are yet more meanings of each word, but I'll stop here.

 

Footnotes

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Addenda

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