After interviewing with the Centre’s Principal, we realized that our topic has changed from manpower issue to bilingualism, especially in relations to Mother Tongue teachers. Although the principal provided us with lots of reasons on the low manpower rate in the Early Childhood Sector, the needs for the centre is otherwise. The centre faced difficulties in hiring Mother Tongue teachers, which touched on the topic of bilingualism. The importance of Mother Tongue language has been emphasized recently as the sector have low manpower rate in Mother Tongue teachers.

 

This is where we realized that what we want to know might not be the needs of the centre. Hence, we decided to focus on Mother Tongue teachers and work on the recommendations. Initially, we wanted to work on the possible ways to get more Mother Tongue teachers into the sector, which is by getting trainees to attend seminars and workshops. However, as it takes a long time to work and implement this idea, it became unrealistic as it requires working with the government to solve this issue. With that, this makes us reflect on our idea and make changes to it. Therefore, we decided to work on how we could tackle on the issue within the centre which is by managing and lessening the Mother Tongue teachers’ workload.

 

In the centre itself, the children are all Chinese students and they are taking Chinese Language. At first, we wanted to do learning materials for all the main Mother Tongue languages in Singapore; Chinese, Malay and Indian. However, since the children only learns Chinese, we decided to focus on doing Chinese learning materials. During this process, we have learnt that there are a lot for us to think into and we have to consider in the centre’s perspective and how the recommendations would be able to benefit them.

 

This has also allowed us to broaden our knowledge on the issue on manpower, first hand by teachers who are currently working in the field through the survey given to them.Through the survey, it also gives us a better understanding of the topic and responses of the teachers showing what the centre needs. This allows us to provide a better recommendation to the centre.