Vanithamani Saravanan

Standard Spoken Language: Tamil Language in Singapore Vanithamani Saravanan

?Standard Spoken Language in School and Media Domain: A case study of Singapore? aims to examine the corpus of Standard Spoken Tamil (SST) in the media and school domains in Singapore, in order to establish SST as an additional resource for the teaching and learning of Tamil. The rationale for this study is that it will lead to instructional strategies that seek to redress the disjunction in the pedagogic context where only one monolithic norm, that of Literary Tamil (LT) prevails. In Singapore, more and more Primary one students are coming from English speaking homes. Given that general situation, Tamil students are able to write well and efficient in using the Literary Tamil variety which is used in formal situation and unable to speak or converse in Spoken Tamil which is the variety used for day to day communication. To develop the oral skills and to make Tamil as a living language in Singapore, students need to speak in Spoken Tamil and understand the diglossic background of Tamil language. This book addresses those issues and provides pedagogical recommendations.