Students entering P1 this year will be greeted by a new MOE Chinese curriculum – 欢乐伙伴 2.0! In this post, we go through the goals of the new curriculum, what has changed (spoiler: it’s more difficult), and some tips on how to help your child excel at Chinese.

Key Goals

Last year, Minister of Education Mr. Chan Chun Sing spoke about the revamped curriculum, talking about greater focus on helping pupils learn and use their mother tongue in and outside of the classroom.

With the younger generation preferring to communicate largely in English, there is a strong need to encourage students to actually use Chinese in their daily life, like crafting social media posts in Chinese, etc.

Lastly, MOE also mentioned the importance of leveraging technology like Artificial Intelligence, eBooks and gamification to engage and support students. As a leading proponent* of the use of AI and gamification to teach Chinese, VocabKing strongly supports MOE’s direction.

“Students can look forward to more extensive use of gamification and differentiated resources, to sharpen their language skills at their own time and pace beyond the classroom,” said MOE.

* Click here if you are interested in learning how AI can reshape Chinese language education

 

What Has Changed?

Disclaimer: The following analysis is based off the P1A textbook as that’s currently the only textbook released from the new curriculum.

The new 欢乐伙伴 2.0 curriculum is more of an update of the previous material rather than a complete revamp, with a lot of similarities between the two. However, there’s a noticeable increase in difficulty – both from the number of words to recognise, and the difficulty of the characters.

If you do a side-by-side wordlist comparison of the new curriculum on the left vs the old curriculum on the right, you will notice that there is a +19% increase in the number of characters to recognise (182 vs 153). There is also a slight increase in the number of characters to write (+6%), but the increase is much lower.

 

 

Importantly, not only has the number of characters to recognise increased, the difficulty of the words taught has also increased, with a number of words that can be tricky for a 7 year old to understand (e.g. 禾). Words like 井 and 古 used to only be introduced much later, but are now found in P1A. Lastly, this is less quantifiable, but when our teachers compare the reading sections (读写乐园, 读一读, 我会读) of both textbooks, they immediate sense the material is noticeably longer and harder.

 

So What Does This Mean?

1. Increased difficulty necessitates increased exposure to Chinese

The increased difficulty of the new curriculum may prove challenging for students from predominantly English-speaking families. In particular, the longer reading passages might cause frustration for students who don’t read much Chinese at home.

Our advice: get your child to start a regular reading habit and it will make YOUR life much simpler in the future. Even just 10-15 mins per a week will help.

I know you are thinking – “it’s too early to be worrying about this in P1, and I can wait until they are in P3-P4 to start”. Speaking from experience, it’s much much easier to get students to read when they are young vs trying to coax them when they are in upper primary.

Students who read just once a week are more engaged in Chinese and do better in the triple killer sections of compre, compo and oral, which cause parents tons of frustration later on.

 

2. Focus on “Daily life (日常生活)” doesn’t mean easy

When MOE says “新教材将继续贴近日常生活，让学生有更多机会运用母语”, or the curriculum will continue to focus on daily-life, this doesn’t mean the material will be easy.

Case in point: PSLE oral is the most important segment and the “killer” section is a series of three free-response questions related to daily-life. Students are asked a question and have to come up with a coherent answer in Chinese on the spot!

Examples of previous questions include: “talk about how you protect your eyes in your daily life” or “besides cleaning up after yourself, what could your school do to promote cleanliness?”

For students who don’t get much practice speaking Chinese at home, this tends to be a huge struggle. And given MOE is continuing to focus on speaking and “real-life usage of Chinese” in the new curriculum, we expect a similar Oral format in the future.

Our advice: the most common suggestion from teachers is for parents to devote one day a week speaking to their children in Chinese. For P1, practice “description” (e.g. how was their day, what is their favorite fruit, self introduction), and this will naturally compliment their “show-and-tell” assessment this year.

As your child gets older, introduce critical-thinking questions. For instance, when talking about their favorite sport, introduce questions like “what makes this sport so interesting” or “how would you recommend this sport to a friend”. This sounds unnatural, but it is a key component of the eOral format and is something many students struggle with.

But what if our English-speaking children refuse to speak or read in Chinese?

 

That’s Where Vocabking Comes In!

Especially for parents that can’t get your child to speak or read Chinese!

For too long, outdated teaching methods have drained the joy out of language acquisition. The 2024 P1 Chinese curriculum overhaul presents the perfect opportunity to help your child love and excel at Chinese.

VocabKing is your personal AI companion that motivates your child to speak and read Chinese. We forego one-size-fits-all instruction in favor of personalized lessons adapted to each child’s strengths and pacing.

VocabKing offers engaging games, speaking exercises with immediate AI feedback, and animated stories that motivate children to practice speaking and reading. Students earn rewards and climb leaderboards as they make progress, and this interactive format solidifies their language learning and helps them speak with increasing confidence.

Join the excitement, parents! Embark on this language journey with your children, and let us help them love and excel at Chinese, one syllable at a time!

PS: Experience our AI-powered platform yourself! We’re offering new users a 7-day free VocabKing trial. Click here to start your free trial or contact us now at +65 9820 7272 for more information!