John Wanstall

AFTER listening to the media, schoolchildren and hundreds of coffeeshop patrons, it seems to me the continued effort to get Singaporeans to adopt correct English is more than an uphill struggle — against the forces of peer pressure, Singlish and SMS.
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Take the local experience of international banker Peter Havelock, a former English teacher from New Zealand who was perturbed when, four months after setting foot here, his daughter Emily "came home spouting a stream of Singlish".
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"She said all her mates at school spoke the same way, and she wished to become popular and not stand out."
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Then there's filmmaker Craig McLeod whose youngest son began talking about mixing "flah" and water.
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"He pointed out the word "flour" on his work sheet — his teacher always pronounces it as "flah"," he said.
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"My kids often come home with worksheets full of grammatical errors," Mr McLeod complained. "The poor kids do not know where they stand."
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As a frequent bus commuter, I often listen to and chat with students on my journeys into town. I was appalled at the standards of communication — that is, if they bothered to talk at all to one another.
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Many of our students are happier holding SMS conversations with the chums sitting next to them.
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I queried them on this, only to be informed — in a mixture of Singlish, Mandarin and Malay — that it was not cool to talk, SMS-ing was far more efficient.
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Today columnist Neil Humphries put his finger on the pulse of a problem some time ago, when he wrote that SMS-abbreviated English was beginning to appear in students' exercise books.
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Singlish may be acceptable for informal social communication and SMS has its uses.
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However, pidgin English — for that is what Singlish really is — has no place in our commercial environment.
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A prolonged diet of Singlish must eventually weaken the speaker's ability to speak English correctly. Hence, the SMS — because people cannot find the words to converse.
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When I spoke of such things to my old English master, Dr E V Bennett, the head of English at Hastings Grammar in the United Kingdom, he was adamant that languages can only be really taught successfully by a native speaker.
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There was always a problem in multi-lingual societies, he said, as grammar and tenses get mixed up in the direct translation of a Chinese dialect, say, into English.
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Indeed, our former French master had come from Paris; our Greek master from Athens University. And Latin was taught by our headmaster, Dr R E E Jones, who had studied Latin and French in Italy for ten years.
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Mr Bennett felt that if Singapore's English teachers spent a year in the United Kingdom, taking a crammer course in teaching the language, it would help them immensely.
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Teachers in Singapore, however, are concerned about the more urgent need to halt the SMS malaise of "short-cut English", or "lazy English", which threatens to send language standards here into a deteriorating spiral. But how do you counter a habit among the tech-savvy young that you can't outlaw, tax or fine — the typical Singaporean responses?
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Back in my old school, we would listen to hours of recordings of actors speaking in perfect English. Eventually, even the dumbest in the class was able to read out loud to our English master, and receive high marks for pronunciation.
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It may sound boring, but listening to presenters on good English radio programmes — such as the BBC World Service — is effective. If parents can get their children to spend half an hour a day listening to how English should be spoken, they might see a rapid improvement.
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What's the rush, you might ask? While we are struggling with our English, the rest of Asia is going full steam ahead in their efforts to master the language of commerce.
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If the study-English trend continues, within a decade, two billion people will be studying English, and about half the world will speak it.
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In China, non-native speakers are learning English at a younger age. Last year, primary schools in major Chinese cities began offering English in the third grade, rather than in middle school.
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Here in Singapore, former English teacher and textbook author Steve Hogan thinks necessity could actually make the unthinkable happen — Singlish could disappear, or at least fade into the backdrop, once students discover that without a good command of the English language, they are likely to be shackled to Singapore.
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"I recently ran a course for a group of Malay girls who all wanted to appear on television," he said. "Because they wanted this so badly, they learnt very rapidly to speak English with excellent grammar and pronunciation."
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The lesson? All kids need is the right motivation

http://www.todayonline.com/articles/51350.asp