Monday 4 February 2013
Singapore"s high hotel rates scare off longhaul buyers
PRICEY hotel rates in Singapore are leaving longhaul buyers at ATF 2013 less enthused with the city-state, despite the recent emergence of several new attractions.
According to the Singapore Tourism Board, average room rates stood at S$261.30 (US$213) from January-November 2012, a year-on-year increase of 5.9 per cent. Average occupancy rate, however, saw muted growth in comparison – a rise of 0.1 per cent over the same period to achieve 87 per cent.
Several longhaul specialists at TRAVEX 2013 said clients were reducing their duration of stay in Singapore or were skipping the destination entirely in their Asia itinerary.
Andrew Morgan, Asia, Middle East Indian Ocean product manager with UK-based THG Holidays, whose company handles a mix of leisure and corporate travellers and events, said transits in Bangkok were usually preferred “as Singapore is too expensive”.
RTT Triple S Tours Travels Israel’s managing director, Benny Binyamin, noted that an increasing number proceeded to neighbouring destinations upon arrival at Singapore Changi Airport, with more going to Malaysia or sailing out with Star Cruises.
Wan Mahsuri Wan Ahmad Kamal, vice president – sales of Themed Attractions Malaysia, concurred. “More tourists stay in Johor and visit the theme parks, then go across to Singapore’s Marina Bay area for day trips. This trend is likely to snowball.”
According to her, Johor is gaining favour as it is now home to new attractions such as Legoland and Hello Kitty Town theme parks. The southern-most Malaysian state, less than an hour’s drive from Singapore, offers three-star hotels at about RM250 (US$82.30) a night. Similar hotels in Singapore are priced at least S$200 per night, she noted.
John Hartono, president of US-based Tedjo Express Tours, urged Singapore hoteliers to “get real” as there were many other “wonderful attractions in Asia” and “tourists will not lose much even if they give Singapore a miss”.
Read more in the ATF Daily
Singapore"s high hotel rates scare off longhaul buyers
Sunday 3 February 2013
Hong Kong trails rival Singapore in students" English skills
Every Saturday afternoon Cindy Tse takes her eight-year-old son to a private class near his school, where he joins other children for two hours under the guidance of an expatriate teacher.
“We want to increase his chances of listening and talking in English, as he goes to a Chinese-medium school,” says the doting mother.
Many others like her spare no efforts in brushing up their children’s language skills – and not just in English. Demand for Putonghua teachers is soaring as China’s clout in the global economy increases.
Since 2009, the Education Bureau has delivered HK$10 million under a special grant to 47 schools to promote six languages other than Chinese and English – Urdu, Hindi, German, Japanese, French and Spanish.
About 15,000 people study French in Hong Kong in primary, secondary and tertiary education classes, with private tutors, at private centres or at the Alliance Francaise – a global institute promoting French language and culture. The French consul said last year that French had become Hong Kong’s fourth language.
But while it has long been a key goal of the government to foster bilingualism in Hong Kong, the language skills of the city’s young people have become a cause of significant concern.
Hong Kong compares favourably with other countries in the region in terms of language skills, but it trails far behind its key rival, Singapore.
Singapore has a much higher proportion of people who are literate in English, according to Amy Tsui Bik-may, chair professor of language and education at the University of Hong Kong.
As its economy grew in recent decades, the government of the Lion City made a conscious effort to popularise the use of English. In 1980, the proportion of Singaporean families who used English as their main language in the home was just 8 per cent. That figure had risen to 23 per cent in 2000 and stood at 48 per cent in 2010.
In comparison, according to last year’s census, the proportion of Hong Kong’s population which use English as the main language at home is just 3.5 per cent. About 45 per cent of Hongkongers used English sometimes while speaking Cantonese as their main language, Tsui said.
And it isn’t just the proportion of people speaking more than one language; language standards have also become a cause for concern, especially since the introduction of the government’s mother-tongue teaching policy in 1997. The policy saw all but a handful of secondary schools required to switch to teaching all classes in Cantonese, rather than English, and is cited as having encouraged more local parents to seek places for their children at international schools.
The government changed direction in 2009, when it announced that from the 2010-11 academic year, schools would be allowed to teach a class in English as long as 85 per cent of students in a class are in the top 40 per cent of their age group academically.
It ended the strict segregation of schools into Chinese and English streams and allowed Chinese-medium schools to set aside a quarter of their lesson time for “extended learning activities conducted in English”.
But the changes are not sufficient to remedy the declining standard of English.
Jao Ming, chairman of the Eastern District Parent-Teacher Association, echoes a common concern about the lack of a stimulating linguistic environment in the territory. “Learning in a person’s native language is a good idea, but you need support measures in society to ensure that students are well exposed to English outside school; there aren’t such measures.”
His daughter, who learned in Chinese, struggled to cope when studying at university, where lessons are often delivered in the lingua franca. “She often studied until very late at night to catch up. She had to make double the effort in her first year and her results in that year were not good either.”
The issue of medium of instruction has long been divisive, a subject of debate among those who favour mother-tongue teaching on the grounds that it will help students learn and others who insist on the value of learning in English in a globalised world.
Anita Poon Yuk-kang, associate professor in Baptist University’s department of education studies, is a staunch advocate of using English as the medium of instruction.
She sees the idea of “fine tuning” the mother-tongue teaching policy as being inadequate for achieving effective bilingual education. Hong Kong has a long way to go, she feels, in raising the level of proficiency in both English and Chinese. She calls for the creation of a holistic curriculum based on studies of the common threads in teaching the two languages.
“I don’t see bilingual education coming yet. It requires long-term planning and funding from the government, but that is not happening. As an international city, we have no choice but to use English as the medium of instruction,” she says.
James Lam Yat-fung, chairman of the Subsidised Secondary Schools Council, agrees that Hong Kong is not a bilingual society, at least on the surface.
“It lags far behind Singapore,” he said. “We have more Chinese than English signs here. There isn’t the linguistic environment here. Employers in the commercial sector and universities have worries about students’ English standards.”
More than 15 years after the handover, students appear to be more comfortable learning in Chinese. The typical student, Lam says, will want lessons to be taught in Chinese even when they are relying on an English-language textbook. “They don’t want to translate ideas into English, or vice versa,” he explains.
In the past three years, about 70 per cent of Form Three students achieved basic competency in English in territory-wide assessments carried out by the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority. But among the problems identified was students’ lack of the topic-specific vocabulary they needed to help them express their ideas.
There were wide variations in the standards of the bottom 30 per cent who failed to meet the benchmark, Lam added.
In the Chinese-medium school where he works, at which English is used to teach maths and science subjects in some classes in junior forms, the changes to the policy on medium of instruction have helped increase students’ confidence about learning in English.
Still, in last year’s maiden Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education examination, only 0.7 per cent of candidates reached the highest level, 5**, in English; only 0.8 per cent achieved it in Chinese.
A report issued by the University Grants Committee in 2010 on aspirations for the higher education sector urged institutions to make renewed efforts to ensure and enhance students’ bilingual (Chinese and English) and trilingual (Cantonese, Putonghua and English) abilities.
Grasping two languages is never easy, particularly in a predominantly Chinese society like Hong Kong. Lam believes there must be more research into how best to enhance students’ acquisition of both languages. He echoes Tsui’s concern about the quality of teaching.
Lack of exposure to a different language environment has undermined the standards of serving English teachers and those under training, he says.
“Some are not good at communicating in the language. To attract more talent to the profession, the government should review the entry-level salary for potential teachers with English-related qualifications from other fields. It is a matter of whether it wants Hong Kong to be an open or inward looking place.”
For now, the burden is perhaps on parents to expose their children to more English – on top of Putonghua. But they’d better make sure their children are building the right foundation to use the language, rather than merely getting prepared for examinations.
“There is so much drilling with exam papers in class due to the exam-oriented system in Hong Kong, something that seems hard to change,” said Jao.
Hong Kong trails rival Singapore in students" English skills
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National Times
Date
February 4, 2013
Category
Opinion
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Amanda Vanstone
Former Howard government minister
The ALP accused Howard of racism on border protection policy that has become the bedrock of Gillard’s agenda.
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Illustration: Jim Pavlidis.
As the September 14 election approaches, we will no doubt hear more from both major parties on the issue of border control. At least we have agreement on some aspects of this policy area. Both parties understand that there are many, many more refugees in the world than we can afford to accept. They agree that the government decides how many we can afford to take and they agree that those who come by boat, because they can afford to pay a people smuggler, should not have an advantage over poor refugees waiting in camps. Offshore processing is an essential and agreed part of achieving that aim.
If Labor really wants to stop the boats, it should toughen up and agree to reinstate temporary protection visas (by any new-fangled name they may choose to make it look a bit different) and to cut off family reunions. We will have to wait and see if that reality dawns. Labor has come kicking and screaming to adopt so much of the Howard policy agenda. This extra little bit shouldn’t be too hard. It would certainly blunt the Coalition attack on the ALP in coming months.
As immigration minister in the Howard government, I am pleased that Labor has at least accepted some of our border protection policies. But I am also irritated. Why? Because Labor constantly sought to portray my party as a bunch of old racists.
The coward’s way, which was frequently chosen, was to call John Howard a dog whistler. This sort of rubbish can easily be peddled through interest groups and those commentators keen to use the opportunity to define themselves as being opposed to racism. Now that Labor has similar policies to Howard’s, I do not hear them whistling any dog tunes. Funny about that. Perhaps Labor sought to portray the Liberals as racists to assuage some guilt about the ALP’s past, or at very least to divert voters’ attention from Labor’s record.
If you know any servicemen who served in Timor during World War II, you might ask them about the extraordinary role played by the Timorese criados in helping our troops. While you’re there, ask them about the anguish of knowing that we refused to open our hearts and evacuate these people who risked their lives to save Australian lives. We left them behind to face an unsafe and unhappy future.
Then there’s former Labor leader Arthur Calwell. He should rightly be acknowledged as the father of our modern immigration system – although you will not hear a Labor person admitting that Robert Menzies, as the then opposition leader, played a critical role in getting it accepted and laid the first brick in Australia’s bipartisan approach to immigration by urging the government to be adventurous rather than cautious.
But there was a darker side to the policy; there was a rule (which proved ineffective but demonstrated intent) that there should be 10 Britons for every non-white alien. And returned servicemen with Japanese war brides found Calwell not only unmoved by their desire to bring their wives home but bitterly opposed. He said that while ”Any relatives remain of Australian soldiers dead in the Pacific battlefields”, it would be ”the grossest act of indecency to permit any Japanese of either sex to pollute Australian shores”.
Calwell fought vigorously after the war to have Chinese, Malay and Indonesian wartime refugees deported. He had a special bill drafted to deal with one, Mrs Annie O’Keefe, an Ambonese woman with eight children who had fled to Australia with them. Her husband had died fighting the Japanese and she had remarried an Australian. Only the good offices of the departmental secretary saved her.
Then there’s Calwell’s infamous line about two wongs not making a white. Some argue it was taken out of context, but not that it wasn’t said. Calwell was a zealous supporter of the White Australia Policy. In contrast, only a few years later, under the Liberals, Paul Hasluck, as administrator of the territories, was able to secure agreement that Chinese and mixed-race people in Papua New Guinea were able to settle in Australia and become Australian citizens.
Getting closer to the issue of border protection, one might find former Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew’s biography illuminating. He was particularly affronted by the Whitlam government’s proposal that Singapore should allow some 8000 Vietnamese refugees to disembark there, whereupon Australia would choose less than 200 to accept here. Singapore could worry about the others.
Whitlam was not a racist. As former Labor minister Clyde Cameron tells the story, Whitlam’s opposition was more political. Cameron and Whitlam’s deputy, Lance Barnard, had organised a flight in April 1975 to bring Vietnamese orphans and babies to Australia. Cameron says Whitlam justified cancelling the flight by saying he wasn’t having ”Vietnamese Balts coming to Australia”.
If you believe Labor, you might believe it was only because of Whitlam that the White Australia policy was undone. You might be surprised to know that the father of Australian multiculturalism, Professor Jerzy Zubrzycki, concluded that the policy ”had its demise at the hands of mainly Liberal ministers and finally of the Whitlam Labor government”.
The Australia prime minister Lee Kuan Yew most admired was Menzies. The postwar Menzies government was a strong supporter of the Colombo Plan, a key element in our early relations with Asia. People with long memories understand the forward and outward-looking policies Menzies implemented. Lee said Menzies understood ”that sentiments and ties of kinship could not displace the realities of geopolitics and geoeconomics in the post-imperial world”. That understanding from an Australian can be phrased another way: The Asian Century is around the corner. And yet Julia Gillard seems to think she discovered it!
Amanda Vanstone was minister for immigration in the Howard government.
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Former Howard government minister
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