hm.

They were raised in China, learnt English in Singapore and want to go on to the West

http://enewslink.asia1.com.sg/brsweb/read_16.brsw?this=result&QDT=1&QFLST=HD%3AHG%3APD&DB=BT%3AST%4006-07&QSTR=raffles&DTSTR=%28%28PD+%3E=+20061216%29+and+%28PD+%3C=+20070518%29%29&PSZ=10&MAXL=200&SUMY=1&HLT=0&LSTN=10&ID=000021966@ST07

The article speaks of Chinese nationals, as well as scholars of other nationalities, who come over to Singapore to study in our schools, mainly for a more English-speaking environment.

Studying in Raffles Institution myself, this is an issue which is very close to me. From secondary one, there has been no lack of mainland Chinese students in my class or neighbouring classes, and these students have been known to be the most hardworking, the most well-behaved and the worst in English.

My reactions to this article, first of all, is that i want to point out some negative labels given to such scholars from overseas. Many such scholars are ostracised in school by the Singaporean students because they think the Chinese scholars are "uncool", are nerdy, and speak in heavily accented Chinese. This ostracising is very prevalent in my school, and it is important to note that this is a very alarming mindset problem of Singaporean youths today.

What then, is wrong here? Why have we given negative stereotypes to such overseas scholars? A possible reason might be academic jealousy. All of us are students, and we all want to do well and be better than others. Noting this, it is difficult to ignore the possibility that students do not like the scholars beacuse they work harder and do better than the local students. Thus the impression of them being nerdy arises. A point to note here is that this is not something applying only to scholars, but includes local students who tend to "overachieve".

Another possible reason is the ostracism of the "uncool", the group of those who do not have fun, study hard, and pull their pants high. This is a very typical scholar, who because he is not in his homeland, he finds it difficult to socialise in a language he is not fluent in. He stays in boarding, which means he has few friends outside of school and the boarders, and finds it difficult to make more. What a majority of students do is make this job of making new friends even more difficult for him, when we label them the way we do.

On another aspect altogether, i find it ironic that Chinese pupils want to learn English, while English-speaking Caucasians tend to want to learn Chinese. It is a well-known fact that the Chinese economy has been booming and expanding extremely fast, and what my parents always tell me is that i have to be able to speak Chinese well if the Chinese market becomes the biggest market in the world by 2020. And yet Chinese pupils forsake their own native tongue for English. My Chinese teacher spoke of how a Chinese scholar who came to RI scored just a C6 for his O Level Chinese, and dropped it when he went to junior college. Chinese is not like English, where there are alphabets. Rather, it is pictorial, which means that after using it less, one can forget how to read it. This is what an English-speaking environment can do to you; so why do the Chinese study here?

In conclusion, foreign students are a very major addition to our school lives. They definitely play very big parts in everyday school lives, but what they have is the dedication and the drive to want to do well. Yet, i feel they might have chosen the wrong environment to learn, because they learn English here and forget Chinese.