It is well acknowledged that the bilingual policy may be the cornerstone of the education system in Singapore. However, there is mounting evidence showing that Chinese language teachers are having a harder time inspiring and engaging their students to study the language, and that the students’ Chinese language proficiency level has been declining. In such context, CLCPRC (2004) launched the modular curriculum to Singapore primary schools to cater to students with varying Chinese language proficiencies, and the learner-centered communicative teaching method has been advocated. Nevertheless, research shows that although the student-centered teaching strategy is conducive to Chinese learning, it could not achieve CLCPRC’s goals considerably. One of the main issues with this method is that it prioritizes fluency over accuracy, thus grammar teaching and practice are often excluded for the purpose of pursuing language learners’ communicative competence.

There is always an issue how the students understand the grammar of the target language. Simply drilling a grammar pattern or asking students to use it in a scenario does not help them understand why it should be in this way. Therefore, it is beneficial if the students can establish a framework of the basic structures of the target language in which all linguistic elements are represented by schematic categories and connected to one another linearly and hierarchically in a network. It is also crucial to teach students how to locate the target components and identify the links between them and other elements in the network by using their primary cognitive abilities and instruments, such as comparison, categorization, generalization, metaphor, and metonymy.

So far there is no cognitive-based research on Chinese teaching and learning in Singapore primary schools. Hence, this project aims to conduct a cognitive-based investigation of P3 students’ learning of Chinese grammar in Singapore bilingual context. The study consists of two parts: to establish a theoretical framework of the basic structures of Chinese grammar from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and to empirically apply the cognitive-based practices generated by this framework in language teaching and learning. This study will focus on grammar learning of a group of P3 students (normal Chinese) in public primary schools in Singapore, observe the current teaching approach and learning outcomes, identify the gap between the learning outcomes and teaching goals, and conduct two pedagogical experiments to fill in the gap by incorporating the cognitive-based practices. The purpose of the experiments is to prove the hypothesis that since the cognitive-based practices accord with cognitive process of human brain, they will determine more effective classroom instruction and learning activities for developing students’ Chinese proficiency.