Singapore is a multi-nation and multi-culture nation. With a total percentage of 77%, foreign citizens of Chinese origin take the absolute advantage. Just as we all know, Singapore has been promoting a long term policy that to regard English as the main language spoken by citizens. As a result, Singapore has lost the natural environment of learning Mandarin Chinese for the children in schools, society or family. Accordingly, the Chinese characters teaching in Singapore becomes a major problem should be solved in Chinese language promotion.
According to the Chinese language Curriculum Standards published by the Ministry of Education in Singapore in 1993, the students are supposed to learn and master 1800 Chinese characters in the whole primary school period. To make a clear knowledge about it, the number of Chinese characters the students should understand from grade one to six is respectively 350, 330, 320, 300, 300 and 200. Even though the characters they should master is decreasing, the increasing accumulated characters bring more stress to them.
On November 26th, Singapore Congress approved the Chinese language teaching reformation proposed by the Ministry of Education, symbolizing that the Chinese language teaching in Singapore stepped into a new reformation. Some of the foreign learners who study Mandarin Chinese may know that Singapore has began to carry out the Chinese language creation teaching method in the schools since the year of 2005, seeking the proper and effective method to improve the Chinese language skills.
In the primary school stage, the main teaching reformation is to teach students in accordance of their aptitude, advocating teaching less but learning more. After distinguishing the different language backgrounds of various races, the students can choose different teaching goals freely. Start from grade one, they emphasize the teaching in listening, speaking and reading instead of the large amount of Chinese characters writing and memorizing. The demands for mastering Chinese characters are decreased and more attention is paid to recognizing characters and reading training.
In addition, the methods for Chinese examination and evaluation are modified. Accordingly, the texts and chapters in teaching books are greatly reduced. At the same time, the Ministry of Education attaches much attention to the teachers training and strengthens the development of Chinese language learning software in order to increase the interestingness of the teaching activities and relive the difficulty for the students to learn Chinese. Of course, Singapore also established some characteristic teaching methods like TPR.