The first time I came to Singapore was when I was 12 and when my mother enrolled me in Raffles Girl’s Primary, I was in Primary 6. At that time, this word “primary” struck me as something foreign. When people ask me which level I was studying in primary school, I was always quick to reply: I am in Year 7 . And the next moment, I started getting puzzled looks from people simply because they do not understand what Year 7 meant.
I noticed that in different countries, education system are labelled differently. For instance in Singapore, in our education section , students are labelled as primary 1, 2, 3, 4,5,6, followed by secondary 1, 2, 3,4 and eventually, J1 or J2. In most Western countries, the education system is labelled as such: US Grade 1 to 12.In Australia, our education system is labelled very similar to that of the US. Instead of the word grade, we use the word "Year" . In Britain, the word "form" is often used to label the academic level of individual student. Eg: Students in the sixth form (which is equivqlent to Singapore's J2 batch of students. ). While "form" is mostly used in the UK , it is also used in US, especially by the private schools.
As the MW defines form as " a grade in a British school or in some American private schools.
From here, it is interesting to see how different words are used differently to label a thing. Take another example of the words biscuit and cookie. The British uses the word biscuits while the americans use the word cookie to refer to a small quick bread made from dough that has been rolled out and cut or dropped from a spoon. Both cookie and biscuit refer to the same things but this object is labelled differently between these 2 societies. More examples to illustrate the differences in labelling the same object :
(American-British)
1.) Windshield vs Windscreen
2.)Pants versus trousers
3.) candy versus sweet
4.) Highway versus main road
5.) Motor versus engine
Although the Americans and British speak a common language English and despite the fact that the earliest settlers in America were the Brits and that one would expect the sort of words used in the Aamerica to be very similar to the British context,the slight differences in the choice of lexical items to describe and label an object is evident. Perhaps during the early days in the American society, the word "candy" is favoured over "sweet" thus becoming appropriated into the context and over time, when the word is codified in a dictionary and the word being acquired by future generations,one often hears the americans saying candy instead of sweet.
Likewise in the Singaporean context, the use of the word porridge differs from our supreme authority (Bitish). In the British context, porridge is defined as a dish made by boiling oats (rolled, crushed, or steel cut) or other grains or legumes in water, milk, or both. On the contrary, our so-called porridge does not fit the definition given above. In layman's terms, what we label as porridge is basically a dish where rice is boiled in water, ingredients (vegetables , meats, peanuts etc.) are added to it and served as a dish in a bowl...
With this in mind, it is not surprising that I should get strange looks from people when I said Year 7. Singaporeans are not primed to label the education level of an individaul in terms of "Year" or "Grade". They are primed to use the word "primary , secondary".