Master of Arts

While there is a large body of research on differential instruction in Western countries, studies examining this issue in Singapore are relatively scarce. One such study is the large-scale Core One project, which was carried out via quantitative coding of undifferentiated sets of classroom lessons across a wide range of schools and teachers. However, being large-scale, it did not provide fine-grained qualitatively nuanced accounts. At the same time, there are also very few studies that have looked at teachers’ assumptions in relation to streamed instruction, and specifically, at a single teacher’s pedagogical decisions against his beliefs and theories about his students academic and linguistic abilities and of appropriate pedagogical instruction in differently streamed classrooms. Therefore, this study attempts to fill this gap by undertaking an explorative investigation of an English Language teacher’s pedagogical choices in an Express and a Normal (Technical) secondary classrooms in Singapore, viewed against the background of his assumptions and theories, or ‘cultural models’, of streamed students and of appropriate pedagogical instruction in the two streams.

Conducted in a neighbourhood school, in two differently-streamed English classes taught by the same teacher, this study collected multiple kinds of data, its data collection procedures including audio- and videotaping of classroom observations of comprehension lessons from each of the classes, construction of day diaries and field notes, and a subsequent discourse-based interview with the teacher. The analysis of the data spanned over four phases funnelling from a macro-level analysis, at the largest unit of the lesson, to a fine-grained micro-analysis of the individual exchange, with a particular eye towards the differences in the teacher’s pedagogical decisions in English language teaching in the two streams. The interview data was subjected to an inductive analysis, which served to probe the teacher’s cultural models of his differently-streamed students and of appropriate pedagogical instruction in English Language in the two streams.

The fine-grained comparative analysis of classroom discourse of the two streams has revealed a number of differences in the teacher’s pedagogical choices and these include differences in the activity structures that make up the interaction patterns, in the interactive and cognitive pacing of lessons, in the interaction purposes and in the form and quality of teacher’s questioning. The analysis of the teacher interview has also revealed that when it comes to accounting for his particular pedagogical choices in the different streams, the teacher reasons consistently by drawing on differential assumptions about the attributes, dispositions and subsequent pedagogical needs of the two sets of students.

The findings of the study suggest that there is a need to raise teachers’ level of consciousness of how their beliefs and perceptions, however unintentionally, may disadvantage some of their students through their pedagogical actions and severely limit what these students can academically achieve. It is only when teachers begin to critically examine and re-think these assumptions, which tend to be deep-seated and widely shared, that they can gain a more judicious and socially responsible perspective on their pedagogical actions and the often harmful implications they may have.