In Singapore primary schools, a group of students are referred to as “low-progress learners” as they have difficulty to keep pace with their counterparts in learning Chinese language. To better understand the spoken and written proficiency of these learners and provide pedagogical directions to educators, this study draws pre-/post-test scores of an oral picture description test and a written proficiency test of about 200 low-progress learners in an evaluative project of the ABLE Programme. It is found that the students scored better on the oral test than on the written test. In the oral proficiency test students drew substantially on their English repertoires in terms of vocabulary and sentence structures. As for written proficiency, they scored well for listening comprehension, character recognition, and vocabulary. They faced challenges in sentence matching, cloze passages, and comprehension tasks. Interestingly, slightly more than half of them scored reasonably in free-writing when given the option to use Hanyu pinyin in their writing. Drawing on these findings, it seems obvious that low-progress students need advancement in reading and comprehending longer chapters of texts and in speaking accurately with Chinese vocabulary and grammar. This paper suggests teachers emphasise reading comprehension at the sentence level and draw on their code-switching instances to recast Chinese vocabulary and sentence structures in their daily lessons.