WHEN a dad sat down to coach his Primary 1 son in Chinese spelling recently, he got a shock.

Instead of a list of Chinese characters, information technology executive Koon Peng Bee, 40, saw only words spelt out in letters of the English alphabet with dashes over them to show the tone to be used when pronouncing the words.

Said the father of two: 'My worry is that without the Chinese words, you are giving children the impression that Chinese is ABC with strokes on top.'

His son's school is not doing anything radical. It is following the Chinese Language syllabus introduced last year, under which Primary 1 pupils spend the first three to three and a half months learning the mechanics of hanyu pinyin, the romanised system of spelling for Chinese words.

The Education Ministry introduced this curriculum to accommodate the growing number of children who start Primary 1 with little or no previous exposure to Chinese, to ease them into the language.

But for parents like Mr Koon - as well as Member of Parliament for Tanjong Pagar GRC Sam Tan, who raised this issue in Parliament on Monday - the concern is that pupils may come to rely too much on pinyin.

Mr Tan should know.

His three children who found pinyin a breeze had such difficulties with Chinese characters that they had to take tuition in the subject.

He told The Straits Times: 'One day when I came home, I was quite happy that my daughter was able to read a Chinese passage loud and clear. Later on, I realised that she was pronouncing all the words using hanyu pinyin.

'When I gave her a book without hanyu pinyin, she couldn't recognise the characters and couldn't read it.'

Mr Tan said this over-reliance on pinyin can go from being a pronunciation aid to becoming 'a stumbling block' that turns learners off Chinese as a subject.

But not all parents worry about their children using pinyin as a crutch.

Mrs Cecilia Goh, a 42-year-old housewife, for instance, sees it as having been 'very helpful' to her son, now in Primary 4 in Rosyth School.

She comes from a Peranakan family and does not speak Chinese, although her husband does. English is therefore the language spoken in their family.

The new Chinese Language syllabus teaches children some basic Chinese characters, such as the numbers one to 10, alongside pinyin. It is only after pupils have mastered the phonetics that they go on to recognise the bulk of the Chinese characters.

With almost half of all Primary 1 pupils now using mainly English at home, up from more than 20 per cent since 1988, the teaching of Chinese has been tailored to suit their varying competence in the language. They now take modules matching their abilities.

Nan Hua Primary principal Lee Hui Feng said: 'We know children come to school on different footings - some use Mandarin more often, some less. We start them off with hanyu pinyin first.'

They are weaned off it from Primary 3.

She pointed out, however, that knowing pinyin helps pupils use dictionaries and word processors.

Mr Tan acknowledged the value of pinyin, but cautioned: 'It's a laudable effort to interest students in the learning of Chinese, but the journey must not stop here. If it does, we will not be able to communicate with our counterparts in China in future.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Feb 27, 2008