The syntactic influences of Chinese and Malay on the learning of English in Singapore

Tan, C. (2005). English or Singlish? The syntactic influences of Chinese and Malay on the learning of English in Singapore. Journal of Language and Learning, 3(1), 156-179.

Background

The author believed that the bilingual policy in Singapore with English as the first language in school and the mother tongue as the second language has meant that the learning of English might be influenced by the languages of the Chinese, Malays and other races. She postulated that Singlish developed due to influences of the students’ mother tongues on the lexical, syntactic and discourse features of the English used by the students.

Aims

The study investigated the syntactic influences of the Singapore students’ mother tongues on the students’ learning of English in the classroom.

Sample

The sample consisted of 28 adult learners studying for a part-time diploma in a polytechnic in Singapore. Out of the 28 learners, 14 were Chinese and 14 were Malays.

Method

The main source of data comprised 28 assignments written by the participants. Other sources of data included writings from educators and researchers who had conducted research in Singapore schools.

Findings

The findings indicated the substantial impact of Chinese and Malay syntax on verbal inflexion, plural marking and the use of passives and articles. There was a tendency for the students to place the object at the beginning of a sentence so that the sentence had an Object-Subject-Verb word order. While the Chinese students tended to use adverbs incorrectly, the Malay students did not demonstrate this problem. Other researchers had highlighted that a number of reduplicated words found in Singlish were derived from both languages. Interrogative pronouns – the wh- pronouns – were often positioned at the end of sentences due to the influence of Chinese. Chinese students also demonstrated difficulties with the use of correlated connectives where connectors such as ‘because’ and ‘therefore’ were used in the same sentence.

Implications

The author highlighted that the significant influences of Chinese and Malay indicated that language teachers had to consider the transfer and interference of the students’ mother tongues in the students’ writing and speaking. She suggested that the teachers consider the difficulties of these learners, reflect on their teaching approaches and engage in innovative practices by leveraging students’ mother tongues as prior knowledge to facilitate the learning of English and by organizing communicative activities using mixed racial student groups.

Original article retrieved from Google Scholar.