A Comparison Study On Chinese Language Teaching In Compulsory Education Of China And Singapore

Han Yu, or Chinese, is the mother tongue for the majority Chinese in China. In a dominant position, Han Yu is used exclusively as medium of teaching and communication, covering fields like politics, science and business, etc. Serving as corner stone language medium of manifold capabilities, Chinese language curriculum has been playing an important role in our nation's Nine-Year Compulsory Education. To equip all students of basic attainments in linguistics, humanities and science, our nation, drawing from other nations' experience of mother tongue teaching reforms, has been effortlessly establishing an open and vibrant Chinese language curriculum. With ethnic Chinese as majority, Singapore has long conducted teaching of Hua Yu (or Mother Tongue, Yu Wen in China), as a compulsory subject, for all Chinese students in both Primary and Secondary schools. Singapore, similar to China, has also an established system of curriculum guidelines and sets of teaching materials for Chinese language teachings. However, Hua Yu, or Chinese, is only commonly used among the Chinese communities. It does not serve the role of being the dominant national language as well as medium of teaching for other curriculum subjects.Throughout the years, our nation has accumulated wealth of experience in Chinese languageteachings. On this basis, there are calls for reforms in Chinese language teachings along with advancing technologies, changing educational needs as well as increasing international exchanges. In the 21st Century, Chinese language teachings are going to face more challenges rising from internationalization, modernization, nationalism and ethnic identification movements. In conjunction with methodologies from comparison study, observation study and literature review, studies has been done on the current developments in Chinese curriculum for Chinese language teaching as in China and Singapore on the basis of personal teaching experience in both countries as well as specialized knowledge in Chinese language teaching, pedagogy and psychology. In view of the issues and findings from the studies, some aspirations have been drawn for Chinese language teachings in our nation's Nine-Year Compulsory education after going through rounds of comparison study, analysis, classification and generalization. The paper covers four major aspects of Chinese language teaching curriculum in compulsory education: firstly, the overall design of curriculum; secondly, teaching materials selection and compilation; thirdly, classroom conduction of teaching; fourthly, subject examination and grading; and lastly, summary.