Published on 11 Apr 2022

孙宝琦:推广阅读必须把关

Lianhe Zaobao noted that reading interests and habits should be cultivated from an early age, but the concepts and methods to do so were still lacking. Local poet and publisher Denon Lim said that since 2020, local schools were more inclined towards e-reading, and Lingzi Media, which was founded by him, had set out to create an online reading community and online reading packages for teenagers. Song Yihui, a best-selling author in Taiwan, commented that teaching Mandarin in Singapore was similar to teaching foreign languages or classical Mandarin in Taiwan, and that it was important to create conversations with students instead of adopting a one-way approach. For example, as a language teacher, her job was to translate classical Mandarin into modern Mandarin without violating the authors’ original intention, and to build bridges between children and their forefathers. A researcher at the Centre for Research in Child Development at NTU NIE, Sun Baoqi and her team surveyed 5,732 students from six local secondary schools from February to April 2021 to find out about their reading habits. From their in-depth conversations with 67 students, they found that only 64.1% liked reading, a decrease of 6.4%-points from another similar survey in 2017. She suggested that having a home environment that encouraged the usage of mother tongue would help to improve students’ motivation to read in their mother tongue.

20220414 孙宝琦:推广阅读必须把关

Source: Lianhe Zaobao © Singapore Press Holdings Limited. Permission required for reproduction.