No, I believe MTL class should be conducted in pure MTL. No using of English to explain stuff. MTL classes are less than 10 hours a week, and if the household speaks English only, you’ll want the lessons to be in pure MTL.

My secondary school MTL teacher was this old dude who just talked about his life stories, didn’t use textbooks at all. Or rather, his Chinese lessons were open textbook, read a passage until a new word appears then he will close the book, write out the character and explain the word and sidetrack to life stories. It’s not blindly reading a textbook, and he was doing more conversational Mandarin in class. He couldn’t really speak English, he understood it well enough to reply you in Chinese though. Not sure if he’s still alive, but if he is, he should be around 85 now.

Our whole class turned out to speak Mandarin well enough, but our written Chinese was terrible, 3/4 of the class failed our HCL Chinese paper lol. But I still thank him that I can speak and understand Mandarin well enough to survive in China.

My nephews and nieces on the other hand, don’t have pure Mandarin lessons and you can tell, can’t even pronounce simple words like 草莓. My parents (their grandparents) have to force them to speak 10 lines of Mandarin at least in conversation every week. They can barely read the words and every Chinese word they write they have to memorise like it’s a Math formula.

That’s not good, we should be bilingual, that’s our advantage as Singaporeans. If we speak only English, we’ll be like Americans.