Mother Tongue Language
Subject Overview
The purpose of learning MTL at primary school is to equip our students with literacy skills that will enable them to harness opportunities in the future as bilingual individuals. MTL teachers adopt differentiated teaching approaches to cater to the needs of students from different home language backgrounds. To ignite students’ joy of learning MTL, PGPS provides a broad range of MTL learning experiences to help students discover their talents and interests.
The 3 MTL subjects offered at PGPS are Chinese Language, Malay Language and Tamil Language. At the end of Primary 6, students are expected to have a sound foundation in listening, speaking, reading and writing MTL, coupled with interaction skills that would enable them to use MTL for communication in their daily life.
For lower primary students and students who need more support in MTL, the learning of oracy will precede the learning of reading and writing. For students at the higher levels and students with a stronger foundation in MTL, learning proceed from reading to oracy and writing. Students are provided with opportunities to progress to different levels of achievement during their primary school years.
Vision, Mission and Approach
In alignment with the school’s direction, the vision of the PGPS MTL Department is to develop PGPS students into confident MTL users who embrace learning with joy and initiative. Our mission is to curate MTL experiences that are relevant, fun and integrated.
We adopt the A3 approach:
- Activate – we introduce students to MTL and seek to arouse their interest in learning MTL;
- Acquire – we help students accumulate the building blocks and competencies needed to master MTL; and
- Apply – we give students opportunities to use MTL and appreciate culture.
To operationalise the A3 approach, we take our students on an MTL Journey comprising of three stages over the course of their six years at PGPS.
In the Orientation Stage (Primary 1 and 2), our focus is to ignite the joy of learning MTL and to inculcate good learning habits that will serve the students well in their MTL Journey.
In the Exploration Stage (Primary 3 and 4), students are exposed to a variety of MTL activities to allow them to discover and pursue their own interests. We also use MTL activities to reinforce values.
In the Mastery Stage (Primary 5 and 6), we enable students to apply MTL with confidence.
Programmes and Desired Outcomes
In the course of their MTL Journey, PGPS students are exposed to a wide variety of MTL programmes and activities that complement what they have learnt in the curriculum, so as to groom them to be i) self-directed learners; ii) confident leaders; iii) innovative collaborators; and iv) caring citizens.
The key considerations for designing the programmes are:
- Broad-based participation – to give all students opportunities to experience MTL programmes;
- Customised by level – to design activities that are age-appropriate;
- Differentiated by readiness – to cater to the needs of students at different levels of readiness;
- Peaks of excellence – to provide opportunities for high progress students to scale peaks of excellence
- Support for less ready students – to ensure that the less ready students are not left behind;
- Interdisciplinary – to integrate MTL with other disciplines, so that students see MTL as relevant; and
- Partnership – to partner with parents and leverage on community resources to support students’ MTL journey.
Programme Highlights
-
Self-Directed Learners
-
MTL Assessment for Learning Tasks
- PGPS MTL Voice 21 Enrichment Programme
-
Confident Leaders
- MTL Competitions
-
Innovative Collaborators
- Read and Share
- Learn It, Use It, Share It
-
Caring Citizens
- Citizenry-Driven MTL Tasks
