ST Forum: Help grads who do as well as foreign talent

From the Straits Times on 20 Feb 2008:

Help grads who do as well as foreign talent

RECENTLY, I befriended a group of scholars from China studying at my alma mater, Nanyang Technological University (NTU). They were in their late teens and were attending foundation courses in English and maths before starting their undergraduate studies. In their five-year sojourn at NTU, they will be given free lodging and a monthly allowance of $500 each. Needless to say, they do not have to pay for their tuition fees. When they graduate, they must work in Singapore for six years as part of their 'payback'' bond.

A highly conservative calculation of their five-year tenure at NTU suggests that each will cost the Government or NTU some $70,000. That is, $30,000 for their five-year tuition fees, including the charges for their foundation courses, and some $40,000 for hostel accommodation and their monthly stipends. I graduated from NTU five years ago, with a good honours degree.

I was in the top 15 per cent of my cohort - and performed better than some of these scholars. While studying at NTU, I had to work as a pizza delivery boy to earn my allowance. Upon graduation, I had to start paying off a $24,000-student loan.

Why are Singaporeans like me not treated as considerately as such scholars? My study loan took five years to pay off after I started working. The China scholars receive financial support, a free education and start their working lives debt free. Their six-year bond is seen as a contribution to Singapore.

Am I not contributing as much, if not more? Non-scholar Singaporeans are not treated in quite the same way as foreign talent, regardless of how well we perform. The disparity is disheartening.

Don't Singaporeans like me who have done well deserve some relief? True, local scholarships are available. But not every Singaporean who graduated well, gets one.

Can the NTU or the Education Ministry tell me why graduates like myself don't deserve some relief or reward for doing as well as, or better than, some of the foreign talent?

Zhou Zhiqiang

At first glance, in a cynical cold-blooded way, a foreign talent policy that provides extra benefits to talented foreigners would make sense. After all, Mr Zhou is presumably a Singaporean and there is no need to be equally generous to people like him even if he is as capable as his foreign friends. To paraphrase an overeducated hawker I once knew, he is a captive of the system. So, because he is a Singaporeans, the government takes him for granted.

Yet, this is not the way to draw in young mobile foreign talents. Yes, generous scholarships to foreign students are a way to get these people to come. That's not difficult. The problem is, how do you get them to stay. Any foreign talent worth his/her salt will be able to infer that the reason he/she is a beneficiary of Singapore's generous foreign talent policy is that he or she is a potential immigrant i.e. not a Singaporean. Of course, it remains his/her advantage to stay a potential immigrant.

Don't get me started on the unfairness of it all to Singaporeans. How does the government expect Singaporeans to show goodwill towards their country when they can see that the system rewards bright talented foreigners better than it does bright talented Singaporeans. No bloody wonder we lose 1000 of our brightest every year. Yes, it is true that most of the 1000 leave Singapore because of better opportunities elsewhere but those 1000 too would have friends and family in Singapore. They may even care and feel outraged that the government treat those friends and family so shoddily. It is also this discriminatory policy that might push Singaporeans like Mr. Zhou to join the exodus.

The Goatherd And The Wild Goats

A GOATHERD, driving his flock from their pasture at eventide, found some Wild Goats mingled among them, and shut them up together with his own for the night. The next day it snowed very hard, so that he could not take the herd to their usual feeding places, but was obliged to keep them in the fold. He gave his own goats just sufficient food to keep them alive, but fed the strangers more abundantly in the hope of enticing them to stay with him and of making them his own. When the thaw set in, he led them all out to feed, and the Wild Goats scampered away as fast as they could to the mountains. The Goatherd scolded them for their ingratitude in leaving him, when during the storm he had taken more care of them than of his own herd. One of them, turning about, said to him: "That is the very reason why we are so cautious; for if you yesterday treated us better than the Goats you have had so long, it is plain also that if others came after us, you would in the same manner prefer them to ourselves."

What is your religion?

One of the things that strikes me as somewhat odd in America is the almost Talibanish national obsession with religion. Well, not really religion in general but just one particular persuasion, Christianity. The majority of Americans are religious to the extent that an ordinary Singaporean who does not share their beliefs would find it almost fanatical and irrational. I've had one who've tried to convert me, very gently, but he inevitably failed.

However, I've long since learned that amongst Americans, there is a strong social stigma against people who have no religion; 'atheist' is a taboo word in many social circles. The lack of belief is practically synonymous with immorality in this country. So, I try not to mention that, for most of my life, that is after the age of seven, I've been utterly irreligious. Actually, I wasn't very religious before the age of seven. I only went to church because my mother's mother insisted that she go to church and that we were to accompany her. After my maternal grandmother's death, we simply stopped going. My mother and her brother were probably not very ethusiastic churchgoers to start with. My father's family is Buddhist but Buddhism is something I know very little about. As a result of both my parents belonging to different faiths, religion wasn't and still isn't something much talked about at home. It was something that other families do but ours don't.

Personally, based on my personal observation of Americans, I don't think that there is a particularly strong correlation between religiosity and human decency. There are some very nice, unselfish and helpful people in my building and they sometimes schedule their experiments on Sunday mornings. There are decent people of every and no persuasion. So, for me personally, it's hard to accept the idea that you cannot have morality without religion.

Besides, it is so damn obvious that those holy books were penned by humans.

ST: It's S'pore's gain even if 30-40% of immigrants settle here: MM Lee

This recent Straits Times article caught my eye. The MM said that it is Singapore's gain even if 30 to 40 percent of immigrants settle here. He also acknowledged that many PRC and India students use Singapore as a stepping stone to the West. Well, it certainly took him some time to catch on to what most ordinary Singaporeans have known for a long time.

I was back in Singapore a couple of weeks ago. Feeling nostalgic, I took out my copy of Commencement 2004, which stated who graduated with what degree in 2004 from NUS. As I thumbed through the pages of the booklet, I saw that majority of the first class honours graduates from the Engineering and Science faculties had very Chinese Singaporean surnames (Lim, Tan, Teo, etc). Mind you, these faculties are where the PRC and India scholars are concentrated. Also, first class honours are usually given to the top 3 to 10 percent of the cohort (depending on the specific course of study).

Given that foreign students make up 20 percent of the NUS undergraduate body, you should expect PRC and India scholars in the Engineering and Science faculties to be grabbing the majority share of the top honours. After all, we are told that for every one local undergraduate on scholarship studying in a university in Singapore, we have two foreign undergraduates also on scholarship. Surely, it would not be unreasonable to expect our foreign undergraduate scholars perform academically. If undergraduate scholarships are given out on the basis of pure academic merit, then we should expect the ratio of foreign to local first class holders to be 2 to 1. Yet, this is not even true in the faculties in which the foreign students are concentrated.

This clearly demonstrates the strong anti-local bias in our foreign talent policy. Good local students, who study the same subjects as equally able foreign students, are given much less financial incentives to enroll in our local universities, unlike their foreign counterparts. What more can I say?

Commonly mispronounced English words in Singapore

One of my pet peeves is the way many common words are mispronounced in Singapore, even by teachers of the English language. By mispronunciation, I mean the way the Singaporean pronunciation of a particular word diverges from that as prescribed in dictionaries. While learned opinion may remain divided as to how a particular word is to be pronounced (e.g. 'schedule' or 'often'), it is fairly safe to say that the Singaporean pronunciation of a common stock word would often be at variance with any of the established standards.

The reason for this state of affair is that reading was and still is not emphasized in English lessons in Singapore schools. I don't recall ever having a class on phonetics or on reading in secondary or primary school and I suppose this is probably true for most Singaporeans of my generation. Many older English-educated Singaporeans do however speak the language with a pronunciation scheme that conforms closely to the prescriptions in dictionaries. Two such speakers who come to mind are Lee Kuan Yew and Eugene Wijeysingha, if any RI alumnus still remembers that old dodderer. Younger Singaporeans, even the English-educated ones, have a more colloqualized pronunciation scheme.

Of course, there will be those in Singapore who will lambaste me for insisting on a foreign pronunciation standard. Afterall, it is the Singaporean-accented English that distinguishes the true sons and daughters of Singapore from foreigners. The same people also say that pronunciation should be descriptive, not prescriptive, and we should stick to the vulgar standard, if one can ever call it a standard. Strangely, no one has ever suggested that we should teach the grammar of Singlish instead of proper grammar. The consensus is that we have a linguistic diglossia in Singapore for grammar. The grammar of educated language should conform to that as prescribed in (British) English textbooks but the grammar of colloquial Singaporean English retains its distinctive character. The same goes for spelling - few in Singapore believe that we should have a uniquely Singaporean orthography. So, why should we reject the pronunciation scheme as prescribed in the same dictionaries from which we learn our spelling?

I think that it is important for educated Singaporean English speech to be less divergent from more established varieties of English such as Received Pronunciation (RP) or General American (GA). Afterall, it is the prevalence of the usage of the language that has contributed to our competitiveness in the global economy. This prevalence has enabled Singapore to position itself as a financial centre. Because English is the language of education, government, commerce and law, Singapore is able to import large numbers of workers from Australia, Britain, India, the Phillipines, the US, etc as well as to export hordes of Singaporean workers to the aforementioned countries. Even if their governments wanted to, countries like Japan and South Korea can't do that, at least to the extent Singapore can, because English is not their official medium. There is simply no reservoir of Japanese-speaking or Korean-speaking labour for them to draw upon.

This is not to say that Singlish should be eradicated but we should recognize that there are established pronunciation norms the same way there are established grammatical norms. At a time when millions in China are trying to learn English, an established English variety without any idiosyncratic pronunciations, it is highly inadvisable for Singaporean schools not to arrest this divergence in Singaporean English speech lest Singapore loses the competitive edge the prevalence of English has given it.

Anyway, here's an incomplete list of commonly mispronounced words that I can think of. The pronunciation scheme follows that of dictionary.reference.com (with slight modifications since the former approximate GA as its idea). Stresses are highlighted in bold while the differences are underlined.

WORD	CORRECT PRONUNCIATION	SG PRONUNCIATION
Calendar	[kal-uhn-duh]	[kuh-len-duh]
Compete	[kuhm-peet]	[kom-peet]
Complete	[kuhm-pleet]	[kom-pleet]
Compare	[kuhm-pair]	[kom-pair]
Comparable	[kom-pruh-buhl]	[kom-pair-uh-buhl]
Committee	[kuh-mit-ee]	[kom-mit-tee]
Complication	[kom-pli-key-shuhn]	[kom-pli-key-shuhn]
Compliance	[kuhm-plahy-uhns]	[kom-plahy-uhns]
Condemn	[kuhn-dem]	[kon-dem]
Condemnation	[kon-dem-ney-shuhn, -duhm-]	[kon-dem-ney-shuhn]
Compose	[kuhm-pohz]	[kom-pohs]
Composition	[kom-puh-zish-uhn]	[kom-poh-zish-uhn]
Concept	[kon-sept]	[kon-sept]
Conceptual	[kuhn-sep-choo-uhl]	[kon-sep-choo-uhl]
Colleague	[kol-eeg]	[kuh-leeg]
Cylinder	[sil-in-der]	[sil-in-der]
Excuse	[v. ik-skyooz; n. ik-skyoos]	[ek-skyoos]
Exclude	[ik-sklood]	[ek-sklood]
Extra	[ek-struh]	[ek-stra]
Estate	[i-steyt]	[es-steyt]
Especially	[i-spesh-uh-lee]	[es-spesh-uh-lee]
Establish	[i-stab-lish]	[es-stab-lish]
Excite	[ik-sahyt]	[ek-sahyt]
Excitation	[ek-si-tey-shuhn]	[ek-sahy-tey-shuhn]
Excel	[ik-sel]	[ek-sel]
Excellent	[ek-suh-luhnt]	[ek-suh-luhnt]
Japan	[juh-pan]	[juh-pan]
Japanese	[jap-uh-neez, -nees]	[juh-pan-ees]
Privilege	[priv-uh-lij, priv-lij]	[priv-i-leyj]
Second	[sek-uhnd]	[sec-kend]
Pressure	[presh-uh]	[prezh-uh]
Rectangle	[rek-tang-guhl]	[rek-tang-guhl]
Rectangular	[rek-tang-gyuh-luh]	[rek-tang-gyuh-luh]
Ticket	[tik-it]	[ti-keyt]
Triangle	[trahy-ang-guhl]	[trahy-ang-guhl]
Triangular	[trahy-ang-gyuh-luh]	[trahy-ang-gyuh-luh]
Wednesday	[wenz-dey, -dee]	[wen-uhs-dey]
Monotone	[mon-uh-tohn]	[moh-noh-tohn]
Monotony	[muh-not-n-ee]	[moh-noh-tohny]
The	[before a consonant/vowel thuh/thee]	[thuh]
Vehicle	[vee-i-kuhl]	[vee-hee-kuhl]
Vehicular	[vee-hik-yuh-luh]	[vee-hee-kyuh-luh]
Position	[puh-zish-uhn]	[poh-zish-uhn]
Potent	[poht-nt]	[poh-tuhnt]
Potential	[puh-ten-shuhl]	[poh-ten-shuhl]

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all readers of this blog. More than 2000 years, the greatest story ever told began on this very night.



Oops. I meant the greatest action story ever told. ;)