Singaporeans split on Mother Tongue weighting

After reading this article, it helps me understand that why some Singaporeans like to reduce Mother Tongue weighting in exams. However to me, reducing the Mother Tongue weighting in exams causes students to reducing their knowledge on their racial language.

If Mother Tongue weighting is decreased, some students will have the mindset of since Mother Tongue weighting is not high in exams, they does not need to focus so much on that subject. This will naturally causes the students to reduce in learning their racial language and students that would like to work overseas would be unable to communicate well with their business friends.

E.g: A Chinese guy that went to china to work and he is unable to write and speak in proper chinese would causes him to be laughed by his China friends.

Being a race such as Chinese, Malay and Indian, it would be a shame to other country's citizens as Singaporean ourself doesn't even know how to speak our racial language. This would then causes Singapore reputation as a Multi-religious country to drop. Foreign will think that although Singapore is a multi-religious Country, citizens cannot even speak properly their religious language. This causes foreigners to have the question of 'How can a Singaporean of a race does not know how to speak or write in their racial language?'.

From the article,

"Communications consultant Monica Lim, 40, holds an opposing view.

In her blog, 'Of Kids and Education', she argues that reduced Mother Tongue weighting would help lessen exam stress on the bulk of students who come from English-speaking homes."

About the above statement made by Communications Consultant Monica Lim, me myself think that if Mother Tongue weighting is reduced, the other subject weighting would increase to make the total weighting of the exam back to the original value. When weighting of the other subject increases, students will also get stress that they are required to score better in the rest of the subject. Therefore, in my opinion, I myself do not agree with the statement made by Communications Consultant Monica Lim.

With respond to this article, I myself suggest that Mother Tongue weighting should not be changed so proper ways of writing or speaking racial languages would be maintained in Singapore.

By: Winston Goh