Offer of Three Official Mother Tongue Languages in All Public Schools in Singapore

Dr Lam Pin Min asked the Minister for Education (a) whether all three official mother tongue languages (MTL) (Chinese, Malay and Tamil) can be offered in all public schools in Singapore; and (b) whether public schools in Singapore are allowed to offer non-official MTLs, such as Hindi, Bengali or other Indian languages, in lieu of Tamil, which is the official Indian MTL.

Our mainstream schools teach the official mother tongue languages (MTLs) as part of the school curriculum. Classes are organised in schools where there is sufficient demand for the subject, premised on our being able to recruit sufficient number of teachers.

Currently, Chinese and Malay language instruction is available in all schools other than the Special Assistance Plan schools. Tamil Language (TL) instruction is offered in most schools except those where the number of students is too small to form a class. There is also a challenge in recruiting suitably qualified TL teachers.

At the Primary level, MOE has provided TL instruction in most schools. Primary students who offer TL attend schools which provide TL instruction, and attend TL lessons conducted in their school. MOE will continue to look into ways to recruit more suitably qualified TL teachers so that more Primary schools would be able to provide TL instruction.

At the Secondary level, students are older and can travel on public transport on their own. Thus, students from schools that do not offer TL instruction attend TL lessons at one of the eleven regional school-based centres, which were set up to cater to students from schools nearby, or at the national Umar Pulavar Tamil Language Centre (UPTLC) which is located near the Farrer Park MRT station. The larger number of students at UPTLC allows students to benefit from a richer TL learning environment where there are more opportunities for interaction in the language.

Mainstream schools do not provide instruction for non-official MTLs. Instruction for non-Tamil Indian Languages (NTILs) of Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu, which are recognised by MOE as mother tongue-in-lieu, is overseen by the Board for the Teaching and Testing of South Asian Languages

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and provided for by the respective NTIL community groups.

NTIL students separately pay for and attend the NTIL lessons conducted by their respective NTIL community groups. These take place primarily at a few designated NTIL centres on Saturdays. For some, they take NTIL lessons conducted in their schools organised by their respective NTIL community groups on school days. This is an arrangement between the parents of the NTIL students and their respective NTIL community group, subject to the availability of suitable teaching venues in the school.