Voices Of Youth

Raising interest in mother tongue

The proposals that have received grants from the Lee Kuan Yew Fund for Bilingualism are excellent investments ("Super Cool way to promote bilingualism"; Jan 4).

They provide great platforms to encourage children to learn their mother tongue, and pave the way for a more interactive and fun approach to promoting bilingualism among young Singaporeans.

These locally developed projects have the added benefit of being culturally relevant. Thus, children are encouraged to pick up fun facts about Singapore while actively learning their mother tongue.

With the rise of smartphones, books are no longer the only platform through which children can study.

Hence, it is important to explore other methods of learning and engaging young Singaporeans. This would be highly beneficial to the population in the long run.

It is compulsory for children to study their mother tongue. However, I hope that with these new projects, children will learn their mother tongue not only out of necessity but also out of genuine interest.

Vivien Tan Ziyi, 15,

Secondary 4 student

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on January 25, 2017, with the headline Raising interest in mother tongue. Subscribe