Mr Liang's view is that if mother tongue - Mandarin, Malay and Tamil - are not made a prerequisite for success in school, we are in danger of becoming a monolingual society.

The main argument for this is that 'Singaporeans, being pragmatic, could not care less about mother tongue', and supposedly once the Government does not make it compulsory to study and excel in mother tongue, we will slowly become 'a monolingual English-speaking country'.

With all due respect to Mr Liang, Madam Jocelyn Lim Chieh Ying's point, 'Place less store by mother-tongue results' (ST, July 18), has been completely missed.

The real issue is not whether we should study languages or not but whether we should make our children sit for language exams and make their scores count.

I have to say that Mr Liang does not make a convincing argument. Indeed, the core of his argument holds the seeds of its own undoing; surely the pragmatism of Singaporeans will mean that they can see the value of being able to speak in more than one language?

We need not fear that Singaporeans will allow themselves to become less competitive in today's marketplace by being able to speak only one language. If we are truly pragmatic, we will probably try to learn more than one language.

And why confine it to mother tongue? What about all the other languages, such as Korean and Japanese and the European languages?

Let's take our pragmatism one step further and allow the learning of all languages according to the interests of our children.

Even if the subject is not offered as part of the curriculum, the child can still go for lessons in the language of his or her choice outside of school hours, and be the richer and happier for it, rather than spending those hours struggling to prepare for a language exam in just the mother tongue.

Even Mr Liang would agree that the fear of monolingualism will be unfounded in the face of the exciting multilinguistic possibilities that this prospect offers, if only we study languages for their intrinsic value and allow our children to explore as many and varied languages as their hearts desire, rather than reduce it into the drudgery of an examination subject in one language that it is today.

Learning a language is very much a personal preference, very much a matter of love and appreciation rather than being turned into a struggle that makes our children hate their language lessons, and we should stop making the learning of languages into a chore and a torture by making it an examination subject, or else even the pragmatism of Singaporeans will not be enough to overcome the loathing that our children have for their mother tongue lessons.

Terence Teo Keng Yu