malcontent wrote: ↑Sat, 20 Jul 2024 1:39 am
Since I have one child that has completed the local system and another that has gone through SAS, I can confirm that the standard of English between my two kids is substantially different. This is evident in terms of breadth of vocabulary, word choices, grammatical structure and pronunciation.
There are also certain speech impediments that are endemic to local speakers. One example: any word starting with the th sound will be pronounced with a t sound… so a word like three becomes tree. My daughter starting doing this after only a few short years in local school, and despite my efforts to persuade her otherwise, she eventually told me: everyone else speaks like that, why do I need to say it differently, and besides, I want them to understand me.
I told her that she also needs to be understood by her grandparents (who have only ever been able to understand about half of what she is saying) and other people outside Singapore. But alas, she doesn’t speak to them on a regular basis, so it has never been a priority. By contrast, the grandparents understand my son just fine, so to me this is a good test, since I am too close to the problem and may not always see it.
Does that mean my daughter has some technical deficiencies? Generally no, although she misreads situations sometimes, this is partly cultural. She scored fairly well on the English section of the SAT, among the highest percentile of all test takers. Not as high as the Math section, but a highly respectable score nonetheless.
Overall, I would say there is a compromise that has to be made if choosing local school. For some people, this might not even feel like a compromise because they don’t know what they don’t know… so it all depends on where you are coming from, what you expect, and where your priorities are.
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