Mother Tongue Languages (MTL)

Curricular Goal

Confident and Effective Communicators,
Culturally-savvy and Self-directed Learners.

MTL students are developed in three critical areas:

Communication skills with knowledge of MTL, possessing the attitude and habit in using MTL in their daily communications;
Culturally-savvy with deepened understanding and appreciation of one’s own Mother Tongue culture and cross-cultural awareness;
Connections with others as self-directed thinkers and learners, equipped with Social Emotional Competencies, ICT skills in MTL learning and global awareness.

To bring about the Joy of Learning in MTL and a need to keep MTL as a living language, we strive to continuously enhance our teaching approach to engage our students in learning. The key areas include: a) enhancement of our in-class teaching and learning in alignment to the latest 2015 syllabus; b) programmes organised for greater exposure of our students to the language skills and developing self-directed learning; c) providing various platforms for the display of students’ talents; d) festival celebrations and MTL fortnight to heighten our students’ own cultural and cross-cultural understanding and appreciation.

Cultural Learning – Cross-cultural awareness

Students are provided with developmental opportunities to learn emerging 21st CC skills (cross-cultural skills) over 6 years through explicit teaching during Cultural Sharing lessons and Festival Celebrations (Head), reflections (Heart) and hands-on activities in class and during recesses (Hands).

Festivals Celebrations
Festivals are an expressive way to celebrate glorious heritage, culture and traditions. Festivals serve the same purpose of bringing happiness to our lives, and strengthen our sense of community. They play an important role to add structure to our social lives, and connect people of different races and culture to appreciate the beauty of our own culture and cross-culture. We believe that it is important to keep festive celebrations alive in school and at home to bring the students closer to one another’s traditions and cultural beliefs.

Festival celebration is an important part of MTL department’s Cultural Learning Model where students are exposed to the different cultures and appreciate them through the experiences during the celebrations and hands-on activities. The four main festivals that we celebrate in school are Chinese New Year, Hari Raya Puasa, Mid-Autumn and Deepavali.

Chinese New Year Celebrations

CNY Concert – Quizzes – Students vs Teacher!

CNY Concert – Chinese Orchestra performance.

P4 CNY Craftwork – Making of CNY card with 3D Orange origami.

P2 CNY Craftwork – Making CNY Card decorated with ang bao!

P5 Craftwork – CNY Couplets for the house!

Recess activity – Chinese Calligraphy

Recess activity – Rabbit origami

Recess activity – CNY quizzes

Recess activity – CNY Traditional paper cutting of “chun“ “春“!

Hari Raya Puasa Celebrations

Mid-Autumn Festival Celebration

Mid-Autumn Celebrations Concert

Mid-Autumn Festivals Celebrations booths and games

Deepavali Celebrations

MTL Fortnight and P4 Cultural Camp

To instil in our students the love of learning MT languages, to promote the appreciation of their culture and to enhance their language skills, MTL teachers organise two weeks of fun-filled cultural and language activities for students every year.

Classroom activities such as Spelling Bee Competition, Inter-class performances, games on idioms and words, the learning and writing of poems, penmanship competitions and reading programmes are carried out across the MTLs.

Cultural activities include hands-on experience in making traditional crafts, playing of traditional games, learning about customs and practices of own culture as well as that of other cultures. All P4 students are immersed in their own culture and learning about other cultures as well during the P4 cultural camp.

MTL Reading Programme

Reading is one of the ways to enhance the learning of MTL. It sparks students’ interest in MTL which leads to greater improvement in their use of MTL in communicating with others and appreciation of MTL. Students are engaged in the reading of various materials such as newspapers, magazines, story books of different genres, meaningful songs and poems.

Each of the MTL has their own unique reading programme. For example, the Malay Language students are exposed to the language through the ‘Marilah Bersastera’ Extensive Reading Programme. Accompanying learning materials are also developed to enrich students’ learning. Students get to do reviews and learn about characterisation and plot which they can apply to composition writing.

P4 Cultural Camp - Additional Games