This report examines the rationale behind the 3 Mother Tongue Language websites for primary school children provided by the Educational Technology Division (Ministry of Education, Singapore), the design concepts, working model of the team that develops and maintains the websites, some difficulties faced and future directions.
Happy
Town, Nadi and Nam Naadi
Sharing
of Experience in Creating & Maintaining Children Websites for the
Learning of Mother Tongue Languages in Singapore
Due to the diverse ethnic background of Singapore students, the teaching and learning of Mother Tongue Languages (MTL), namely the Chinese Language (CL), Malay Language (ML) and Tamil Language (TL), is a continual challenge. To promote more active learning of MTL in school and at home, the Educational Technology Division (ETD) of the Ministry of Education (MOE), Singapore, has specially created 3 MTL websites for school children aged 9-12 in Singapore.
Singapore is a multi-racial country, with approximately 76% Chinese, 14% Malay, 8 % Indian and 2% other minority race. English is designated as the common working language for social coherence.
English is the instructional language in schools. The Bilingualism Policy in education was put in place in 1966, one year after the independence of Singapore to make sure that students do not lose touch with their ethnic roots, as MTL is crucial for the transmission of our heritage and core values. MTL are taught in schools mainly in Mother Tongue lessons. While MTL lessons share equal number of periods as English Language, it is clearly not sufficient for the learning of language as the main instructional language for almost all other subjects in school is still English Language. Now, MTL is one of the 4 examinable subjects in primary schools and one of the 7-9 subjects among the secondary schools.
The home environment has been traditionally the place where students communicate most in their MTL. However the recent trend in the language pattern at home shows worrying signs. In a survey done by the Singapore Statistic Department in 2000, the proportion of children aged 5-14 years who spoke English most frequently at home increased from 23 per cent in 1990 to 36 per cent in 2000 for the Chinese, from 8.3 per cent to 9.4 per cent for the Malays and from 40 per cent to 44 per cent for the Indians (see Table 1).
Ethnic Group/Language |
1990 (per cent) |
2000 (per cent) |
|
Chinese |
100.0 |
100.0 |
|
English |
23.3 |
35.8 |
|
Mandarin |
57.6 |
59.6 |
|
Chinese Dialects |
18.9 |
4.3 |
|
Others |
0.2 |
0.4 |
|
Malays |
100.0 |
100.0 |
|
English |
8.3 |
9.4 |
|
Malay |
91.6 |
90.1 |
|
Others |
0.1 |
0.5 |
|
Indians |
100.0 |
100.0 |
|
English |
39.6 |
43.6 |
|
Malay |
18.4 |
12.9 |
|
Tamil |
35.6 |
36.3 |
|
Others |
6.3 |
7.2 |
Table 1: Resident Population Aged 5-14 years by language most frequently spoken at home (http://www.singstat.gov.sg/papers/snippets/languages.html).
It is under the increasingly challenging situation in the teaching and learning of MTL, as well as the shortage of suitable MTL websites for primary school pupils, that MOE decided to create 3 MT websites for primary schools.
Since 1997, all Singapore schools were provided with IT infrastructure under Ministry of Education initiative ¡°IT Master Plan¡±, which purports to achieve the ratio of 1 computer to 5.5 students. In recent years, internet has also found its way into homes and is no long unfamiliar ground for our students. Singapore is one of the most wired countries in Asia. More than 50% of the household has computer and internet access. It is no longer a problem to reach out to students via Internet.
Internet would be an excellent resource for the learning of MTL if there are ready and suitable resources online. It was found that educational resources on the web were mostly text-based and has limited interactivity. ML websites were relatively scarce and although there were a good number of TL and CL websites for school children found on the World Wide Web, it was a challenge to find websites with content and language suitable for Singapore students. Certain aspects of these foreign MTL websites were unsuitable for the majority of Singapore students. For instance, Singaporean Chinese students would have difficulties recognising Traditional Chinese characters used in the Taiwan and Hong Kong websites, as they learn Simplified Chinese in school, just like China. However, the language standard of a China student is a few years ahead of a typical Singapore student of the same age or level. Our Malay and Indian students are also not using MT language at the same level as their counterparts in Malaysia and India respectively.
The creation of Happy Town website was undertaken as R& D project in the year 2000, followed by ML and TL websites in 2001. The objectives of the website are mapped out as follow:
¡ì To promote the use of IT in MTL learning through meaningful content and interesting activities.
¡ì To create a platform for students to showcase their creative linguistic skills
¡ì To promote culture and desired values
¡ì To provide a safe environment for pupils to interact via the internet
Target Audience
The team first identified their target audience. Happy Town website caters to learning needs of children aged 9-12. These pre-adolescence are
¡¤ motivated by task-based activities
¡¤ independent with a high activity level
¡¤ able to express a wide range of emotions
¡¤ able to think independently and critically
¡¤ tied to peer standards and need to be part of a group
Based on these characteristics, this group of students needs many successful experiences and varied activities to keep occupied. In short, they need a channel for creative expression and a platform for socialization.
At age 9-10, the students¡¯ language ability is barely sufficient to do individual surfing. Therefore, language used in the website should not pose as a hindrance. The vocabulary used in the CL website has to be aligned with the CL curriculum used in schools. Glossary should be provided for difficult words.
Content
True to the objective of learning MTL using IT, the content should provide a variety of activities to allow students to learn MTL in a fun and informal way, as children learn best when they are having fun.
The language components are weaved into online interactive games to reinforce learning. This is the main attraction of our websites that distinguishes our websites from all others on the web. There is also a constant flux of jokes and brain-teasers that provide light-hearted relief.
The content should address some of the problems students faced in using the language. Common language problems will be highlighted, for instance, the distinction between 2 words. Explanation, examples and simple exercises will be included for a more holistic understanding.
The content should also be effective in cultivating students¡¯ love for the language and culture. The use of stories and folklores from one¡¯s own culture will ensure that students keep in touch with their roots. Only positive and desirable values that help build characters will be featured. The website will also provide articles on other culture, to broaden the horizon of our students and to learn more about acceptance and tolerance of other cultures.
To expand students¡¯ knowledge, the website will provide up-to-date information to keep the students posted of the happenings around them. The website also provides synopses of library books to arouse pupils¡¯ interest in reading the books themselves.
The website will provide students with a platform to express themselves. Students are free to submit their work either through their teacher or by themselves. The selected articles are put on the web and their peers can learn from the comments given by the working committee in ETD. The website will feature talented children to allow students to recognise the different talents of fellow friends. One of the functions of the website is to facilitate exchanges among students. There is connection with the peers as the students can write to the outstanding pupil and make friend. The website also provided a channel for students to ask questions of any kind.
Throughout the websites, constructive and encouraging feedback is provided in the articles and game to help students gauge their performance and to help students experience success.
Design
The interactive model such as the screen layout and navigation, multimedia features and interactivity, is to be kept simple and clear-cut to cater to the target audience. The navigation is to be user-friendly, the interface clean and the instructions are kept simple. The website provides its initial direction in the form of a main menu, whereby students click into the different sections. In every interface, students are able to access other sections.
The online interactive game is the main feature that stands out among the rest of the educational websites on World Wide Web. It is designed, scripted and programmed in-house, providing the students with interactive model that incorporate learning of language.
Technical Aspects
The whole website will be put on the MOE server, as the daily access rate is very high on weekdays, and the file size of the whole website is preferably small. While schools access the internet through broadband, most students still use the more affordable dial-up access at home, thus the interface cannot be too graphic-intensive but streamlined for quicker loading but still be appealing to young users. To cut down on loading time, the majority of the content on the websites will be text-based. ML uses alphabets as in English, thus there will not be any problem with text based content. Image font for CL and TL, initially in images, will be kept minimal, whilst the rest of the content will have to be accessed by respective deciphering software.
(2) Implementation and Maintenance
Happy Town website was successfully launched in May 2000. The launch and success of Happy Town website spurred the team to develop 2 other MTL websites, Nadi and Nam Naadi, which were launched in May 2001. Nadi and Nam Naadi cater to children aged 10-12. The 2 newer websites are based on the same rationale and design concept that the team came up with.
The Happy Town website is currently updated once every 10 days and the Nadi and Nam Naadi websites are updated once fortnightly.
Due to the relatively small market size for ML and TL resources, it is less viable for publishers to develop websites for ML and TL, thus the 3 MTL websites are conceptualized, designed and developed solely by officers from the ETD. They are the main content providers of the websites and take turn to be the webmasters. The 3 webmasters of the websites are primarily in charge of managing the websites while a total of 6 other officers in the department are also partly involved. These ETD officers worked under a 1-year work schedule to contribute articles and do research for the content component. 3 graphic artists from the department are also part of the committee to take care of the aesthetic aspect. Besides 1 programmer in the department, student programmers on work attachment are also deployed to take care of the more technical component of the websites, such as programming the games.
The webmasters also harnessed support from willing school teachers to join the respective working committees. The teachers¡¯ task is to provide feedback as well as to contribute contents such as their own articles and their pupils¡¯ work. They also act as ambassadors of the websites to promote the websites to more schools. There are different modes of communicating with the teachers. Happy Town webmaster, for instance, communicate with them by using the ¡®Notice Board¡¯ feature in the websites. Twice a year, the teachers meet for updates. Currently, Happy Town is working with teachers from 22 schools, Nadi with 18 schools, Nam Naadi with 12 schools.
The shortage of manpower is overcomed by effective sharing of resources. Interviews and exclusive news are translated into 3 languages, reaching out to different pockets of students. Online games were designed to suit all the 3 MTL websites. Reusable media such as sound clips and video clips produced by ETD are also tapped on. These are all cost effective method to help us maintain the 3 websites with budget of not more than S$10,000 per year.
Sharing of resources
The use of the similar concept in designing and sharing of resources has significantly cut down the time and cost for developing the websites, but not without limitation. Take online language game for instance: TL and ML words are much longer than the CL. When inserting TL and ML words in a game, more space is needed. Thus it is not possible to put any Tamil words in a small object such as a tennis ball. The language structure, components and grammar are also different, making it even harder to create game that fits all 3 websites. Compromises are often made in terms of graphic design.
Sensitivity to differences in cultures is also crucial. When designing graphics, special cares are taken to avoid offensive images, such as picture of dog or pig, which are unacceptable in the Malay culture.
Supply of content
To sustain the interest of students, the CL website is updated every 10 days and ML and TL websites are updated fortnightly. The submission date of contribution in the schedule was set at least 1 month earlier and during meetings, teachers are encouraged to submit all their contributions at the beginning of the year. Periodical reminders were also sent to teachers.
Active Viewers¡¯ Participation
It is also a challenge to entice and engage our otherwise passive viewers in more interaction and communication, such as participating in the web-based contest, activities and give feedback spontaneously. It is found that viewers are more forthcoming in activities that require simple interaction such as clicking on an answer or fill in simple responses.
Viewers¡¯ End
Accessing websites
The 3 websites contain images, audio and video on the websites. To cut down on loading time, most content was text-based so as to minimize the file size. As such, home users without browser that supports unicode will have difficulties accessing the content for CL and TL. Before MOE introduced standard Tamil fonts, text has to be converted to images as different schools used different Tamil fonts. MOE has since standardized the Tamil fonts used in schools. All schools were also provided with Chinese software for accessing and input Chinese characters. With introduction of Window XP, home users can now see Chinese characters on website without installing any Chinese software.
(3) Improvement and Enhancement
The websites has been well received by schools in these 3 years. As on 12 Sep 2003, Happy Town has been accessed more than 438131 times. Nadi enjoys 63118 hits and Naam Nadi 57493, remarkable for the relatively smaller ML and TL student population.
Constant reviews were conducted to enhance on the websites so as to make the content and interface even more relevant and vibrant. The websites underwent major face-lift in 2002 based on feedback gathered from surveys and developers assessment.
In an earlier Happy Town survey done by teachers and pupils in 2001, the respondents found the website very appealing and has met the expectation of providing needs for pupils in learning of CL. Teachers used the website content as supplementary teaching materials. Pupils found the content useful in helping them learn CL and chose the playground as their favourite station. However, about one-fifth of them did not find the discussion forum had reached its objective of raising interest in current affairs. When Happy Town was revamped in 2002, some of the less popular items were replaced, such as the mail box and discussion forum.
A recent online survey was conducted to get a snapshot of viewers¡¯ response to the Happy Town website in May 2003. It was found that 82% of the 155 respondents was those between 9-12 year old, signifying the website attracted the target group. 65% of the respondents of Happy Town survey visited the website at least once in 10 days. Most of the respondents chose ¡°Playground¡± as their favourite.
Surveys were done from the teachers¡¯ perspective for the Nadi and Nam Naadi websites.
For the Nam Naadi website, the respondents found the content suitable for students and they are satisfied with the website. Teachers¡¯ focus is different from the self-learning motives that we set out in the beginning. They would like the website to provide more content that helps in the examination.
The findings of the survey showed that Nadi website has met the expectations and needs of the targeted users in most aspects. The contents are interesting and suitable for the intended age group. About 87% of the respondents to Nadi website survey said that they surf the net with their students once a month. About 90% are satisfied with the website.
Continual effort will be made to ensure the website¡¯s relevance and vibrancy.
While the hit rates are high, the team hopes that the websites reached out to even more students in Singapore. Publicity drives to reach out to wider audience are already in the pipeline. Besides working with local press to promote the websites, more out-reach workshops will be conducted in the next few months.
The sudden SARS situation in the country has shown the importance of online resources. During the mandatory school closure, the MTL websites saw a surge of hits in the 3 weeks. Students were able to access internet resources at home for learning and teachers have used our websites as lesson substitute. Many have requested for these self-learning websites to be made more teacher-friendly, so that at times of need, can be used as a platform for online classroom teaching. The team will work towards providing a new teacher-link for more lesson ideas to be shared by the teachers.
The websites will be reviewed periodically and improved based on the viewers¡¯ response so as they are made as relevance to the students as possible.
It is hoped that our experience in creating and maintaining the 3 MTL websites will be a useful reference for those who are planning for or hosting children learning websites, under budget and manpower constraints.
Annex
The new Happy Town took on the virtual town image. The name denotes a happy place for the learning of Chinese Language. Dr Happy is the mayor of this virtual town. Students are able to roam about in the town in five locations: petrol station, playground, exhibition hall, broadcasting station and IT street.
Petrol Station-provide articles that boost the language ability of students, including grammar, inspiring stories and introduction of Chinese and world culture
Playground- provides online language games, jokes and brain teasers.
Exhibition hall- exhibits students¡¯ work, show-case individual students articles, schools¡¯ column and art work by students
IT street - provides write-up on outstanding or talented students, happenings around the schools and latest news and product in the market.
Radio station-¨C provide story books recommendation, website recommendation, news dedication of songs for the lower primary (7-9 years old)
Both Nadi and Nam Naadi mean ¡®pulse¡¯, and both website share a mascot which is a personified heart representing pulse. The two websites share the same conceptual framework. The websites contains 5 locations, each presenting a different area of learning. For Nadi, they are Nadi Jauhari (Knowledge Pulse), Nadi Budaya (Culture Pulse), Nadi Berita (News Pulse), Nadi Bahasa (Language Pulse) and Nadi Ria (Fun Pulse) . For Nam Naadi, they are Arivu (Knowledge), Panpaadu (Culture), Seithi (News), Mozhli (Language) and Vedikai (Fun).
The content of each of the 5 ¡®locations¡¯ in Nadi and Nam Naadi are as follows:
Knowledge ¨C provide information on general knowledge and showcases pupils¡¯ work
Culture- provides information about festivals, cultural heritage and our pioneers
News- updates pupils on affairs of the nation and school news
Language- feature reviews of books selected by the NLB, interesting articles on language and hosts contests for pupils.
Fun ¨C provides an avenue for children to have fun with language through riddles, quizzes, jokes and interactive games.
1. Gage/ Berliner, Educational Psychology (Fifth edition). Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992.
¡°The Development of Cognition, Language and Personality¡± Chapter 4
2. Ministry of Education, Singapore 2003.¡°IT in Education, IT Master Plan¡±,
http://www1.moe.edu.sg/iteducation/masterplan/
3. Singapore Department of Statistic, 2003. ¡°Resident Population Aged 5-14 years by language most frequently spoken at home¡±,
http://www.singstat.gov.sg/papers/snippets/languages.html
4. Happy Town website, Educational Technology Division, Ministry of Education, Singapore 2003.
http://www1.moe.edu.sg/happytown/
5. Nadi website, Educational Technology Division, Ministry of Education, Singapore 2003.
6. Nam Naadi website, Educational Technology Division, Ministry of Education, Singapore 2003.
http://www1.moe.edu.sg/namnaadi/
© Copyright 2001. The authors, all authors¡¯ names, assign to the University of New Brunswick and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive license to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive license to the University of New Brunswick to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers, and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the authors.