Mandarin Competence of Primary School Students in Singapore: A Preliminary Comparison Across Academic Level and Home Language Backgrounds

This study investigates Chinese language competence of Primary 1, Primary 3, and Primary 6 students in Singapore schools. A total of 720 students were involved. Their Chinese language productions were classified into 15 parts of speech and six sentence patterns. Students of the three class levels show similar profiles for word types but divergent sentence patterns, albeit with different levels of competence. The same findings were observed when the students were compared in terms of home language background.