Historical Development Of Singapore Primary School Bilingual Education

Singapore has been implementing bilingual education since the founding of the nation. The system stipulates that all students must study two languages. Bilingual education in Singapore has already formed its own characteristics during 40 years,and a mature system of itself based on its basic theory. It is regarded by the world wide foreign language teaching society as a successful foreign language teaching policy. Bilingual education has currently been a highlight in our education innovation. However, some bottle-neck problems are greatly challenging us now.With the coming and development of the society of knowledge economy and globalization, English is gradually established as a common language in the world. Besides, China access to WTO makes it likely that modern education is confronted with many challenges ever since. In view of the fact that English was, and still is, the main teaching language in Singapore schools, the competency level of English language thus directly affected the test result. On the natural's level of education, although bilingual teaching has come into practice in recent years, a common point can be analyzed out that modern education must strengthen the teaching of English while enhancing students'English theoretical competence and comprehensive practical ability in an all-round way. In order to meet with the new challenges, some schools in China have started to try a completely new experiment ----bilingual education experiment---one that uses Chinese and English to teach such non-language subjects as mathematics, natural science, computer and so on. Attempts are made so to accommodate students with more opportunities of information input, to build a better language learning environment, and to bridge the gap of failure and loss of English teaching learning in China, and hence changing the situation of"Deaf and Dump English". Therefore, I set up my study on this subject. I think it is quite meaningful to improve our basic education with high quality and high level by searching for the history development of primary school education in Singapore and discovering the rules of the bilingual teaching.This thesis has mainly discussed from four parts the history development of Singapore bilingual education at primary school: The first part elaborates the process of its history development, and from the view of economy, politics and culture analyzes the factors which affect the development. The second part is the main body of this thesis. This part explains the history development from four periods. The third part elaborates the affection to its nation and society. Finally, according to the experience of Singapore bilingual education at primary school,the last part provides some advisement to the bilingual education in our country.