20 January 1999

This report presents a summary of the key findings on the learning of Chinese Language from the survey carried out by Forbes Research.

Forbes Research was commissioned by the Ministry of Education to seek views from pupils and parents on the learning of the Chinese Language (CL) at the primary, secondary and junior college levels. Respondents were asked questions relating to the standard of Chinese, the Chinese cultural content and values in the textbooks and, the time and effort spent on learning Chinese.

A quantitative survey was administered in February 1998 to samples of pupils in 15 schools at various levels from Pri2 to JC2. The parents of these pupils also participated in the survey.

The findings in Section 2.1 of this report pertain to the MP (an abbreviation for Main Population) samples. Each sample consists of about 360 pupils selected from each of the levels Pri2, Pri4, Pri6, Sec2, Sec4 and JC2. The selected samples were representative of the population of the respective levels in terms of factors that are relevant to the learning of Chinese Language such as CL ability of the pupils and school environment.

The findings in Section 2.2 of this report pertain to the MP samples and three other specific groups of pupils with different home background and school performance.

The surveys on MP samples revealed the following findings on the learning of Chinese Language in schools.

Importance Accorded. The majority (about 80% to 90% across all levels) of the pupils felt that Chinese Language was an important subject (Annex 1). Similarly, this view was supported by about 80% of the parents (Annex 2). In addition, among these parents who felt that Chinese was important, a reason cited by over 80% of them was that learning Chinese allowed the understanding of Chinese culture and values (Annex 3).

Motivation. The level of learning interest for Chinese Language was lower for pupils who were higher in the academic ladder. At Pri2, the percentage of pupils who rated "like/like very much" for Chinese Language was 76.9%. This percentage decreased to 64.8% at Sec2 level and 35.1% at JC level (Annex 4). However, what had increased significantly were not the proportions of those who disliked/disliked very much, but rather the proportions who were neutral towards whether they liked Chinese Language as a subject. At Pri2, 6.8% were neutral towards Chinese Language. This percentage increased to 24.2% at Sec2 and 41.9% at JC2.

Other than at Sec2, all other levels recorded a higher proportion of pupils who had a liking for English language and Mathematics as compared to Chinese Language (Annex 5).

More than 90% of the parents supported the inculcation of Chinese values through school textbooks (Annex 6). Of the minority who did not agree to inculcating these values through school textbooks, the two most-cited reasons were "such values should be inculcated by the family" and "doing so would increase the workload of the pupils".

To have a better understanding of the difficulties faced by pupils in the learning of Chinese Language, three other groups of pupils in the primary schools were identified. A similar survey was administered to the pupils and their parents in these three groups. These three groups are denoted by WCL, SA and ESH.

WCL is an abbreviation for a group of pupils who were weak in Chinese, but strong in English and Mathematics. This group of pupils was selected from five primary schools based on their school results.

SA is an abbreviation for a group of pupils who were strong in all three subjects - Chinese, English and Mathematics. The pupils were selected from two primary schools based on their school results.

ESH refers to pupils coming from a specific type of school. Pupils from this type of school were predominantly from English-speaking homes. Five such primary schools were identified and all their pupils in Pri2, Pri4 and Pri6 were selected for the survey.

Comparison of findings across groups could shed some light on the difficulties faced by pupils, especially those from the English speaking homes. However, findings from WCL , SA and ESH should be interpreted with caution and should not be over-generalised.

Educational qualification of parents. The distinction shown here is that WCL has a higher percentage of parents who had university degrees. ESH’s (36.7%) composition was somewhere in between that of WCL(56.5%) and MP (15.1%) (Annex 7).

Housetype. SA and WCL had a high composition of parents who were residents of landed properties (42.9% of SA and 47.1% of WCL). ESH had the highest composition of parents who lived in private condominiums and apartments (32.4%) (Annex 8).

Frequently-spoken language. WCL had the highest proportion of pupils who came from an English-speaking background (94.4%). MP has the highest proportion of pupils coming from a Mandarin-speaking background (54.2%). The ESH’s composition was somewhere in between the two groups, with 80.6% coming from an English-speaking background and 16.0% coming from a Mandarin-speaking background (Annex 9).

Pupils’ Perceptions. Pupils representing the ESH group felt that Chinese Language was the least easy among all the three subjects, namely Mathematics, English and Chinese language (ie. 34.7% said Chinese was easy/very easy; 75.9% said English was easy/very easy and 55.7% said Mathematics was easy/very easy). This observation was true for even the SA pupils who, in spite of their good grades in Chinese, regarded Chinese as the least easy subject of the three (ie. 37.0% said Chinese was easy/very easy, 61.7% said English was easy/very easy, 48.1% said Mathematics was easy/very easy) (Annex 10).

Parents’ Perceptions. About 30.0% of parents in MP felt that the Chinese Language standard in school was high or too high. Similar view was shared by 58.8% of parents in WCL group. In the ESH group, the proportion that responded "too high" was 14.6% while "too low" constituted 0.8% of the respondents. In comparison, the corresponding percentages of the MP group were 10.3% and 2.1% respectively (Annex 11).

Importance Accorded. Chinese was regarded to be important in the academic curriculum by most pupils and parents. About 89.9% of the MP pupils regarded learning Chinese to be important/very important. Similar view was shared by 82.7% of the ESH and 72.9% of WCL pupils (Annex 12). The percentages of parents that responded ‘important/very important’ for MP, ESH and WCL parents were 85.0%, 82.7% and 75.8% respectively (Annex 13).

Motivation. The proportion of pupils who had a liking for the Chinese Language in ESH (50.8%) was higher than in WCL (23.7%) but lower than in MP (69.5%) (Annex 14).

Comparison of the effort expended by each group on tuition and self-preparation across the three subjects revealed that WCL, SA and ESH pupils spent the most amount of time on Chinese Language on average, while MP spent the most amount of time on Mathematics(Annex 15). WCL pupils spent almost twice as much time studying Chinese than Mathematics.

On comparing the total time spent on Chinese tuition and self-preparation per week by the different groups of pupils, it was found that WCL spent the most time on average (6.3 hrs). This was followed by SA, ESH and then MP (5.3hrs, 4.7hrs and 3.8hrs respectively) (Annex 15). Thus, WCL group spent almost 70% more time, and ESH pupils about 20% more time, outside of school studying Chinese, as compared to MP pupils.