The Bilingual Education Policy in Singapore: Implications for Second Language Acquisition

Widely hailed as an educational success story, Singapore, a multilingual island nation in Southeast Asia, embraces an officially bilingual education policy. English is the medium of all content-area education from the start of schooling, with students’ official “mother tongue” required as a single subject. Although called the student’s “mother tongue,” these languages may not be the student’s home language, resulting in many students studying two non-native languages in school. I will address the following questions in this paper: What assumptions about second language acquisition, bilingualism and language planning underlie Singapore’s bilingual education policy? How does the case of Singapore illuminate current theories in second language acquisition and language planning?