Educational Research AY2015/2016

My research study focused on the role of the school and home linguistic environments in relation to early bilingual skills in receptive vocabulary and expressive language. The research study is part of a larger longitudinal project, and takes on a mixed-methods approach. Twelve children were examined from the larger project of one thousand and five hundred pre-schoolers from various pre-schools across Singapore, regardless of their Mother Tongue languages. Owing to this, the participants may come from very different types of pre-schools and may have different home linguistic backgrounds. Although Mandarin, Malay and Tamil skills were assessed across the larger sample, this paper will only focus on findings among children who spoke Mandarin. The findings indicate that the types of school did not have a strong relation to young children’s abilities in the receptive vocabulary and expressive language skills in both English and Mandarin. On the other hand, home linguistic backgrounds did play a vital role in young children’s acquisition and development of receptive vocabulary and expressive language skills of both English and Mandarin.

In 2016, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on the Zika virus, categorized as a global epidemic after reports of its detection in various countries and territories across the world epidemic. Since then, Zika had received widespread coverage in both the international and local news media. This study analyses The Straits Times (ST) one of Singapore’s major broadsheet to assess the framing of its news coverage from 1 January to 31 June 2016, in relation to the risks imposed by the Zika virus. Four key frames were identified: Information of risk-magnitude, citizen as risk manager, sensational content, and comparison of risk scenarios. Findings revealed that news courage was highly dominated by the frames of sensational content and comparison of risk scenarios that exhibits high sensationalism, and contained a significant amount of information to promote self-efficacy.

Students worldwide often face difficulty in generating the functional rule underpinning a linear pattern generalising task. The difficulty can get even more pronounced when the figural pattern depicts a quadratic relationship and is not presented as a sequence of successive configurations. This paper draws on a research study conducted in Singapore that investigated the generalisation of four figural quadratic patterns by 32 Year 8 students (15 boys, 17 girls) from one secondary school. The figural quadratic patterns were presented in two different formats: (i) a sequence of three secessive configurations, or (ii) a single diagram or a sequence of two or three non-successive configurations. The students were distributed into two groups: one assigned to the former format and the other to the latter format. Of the 32 students, 15 of them (7 boys, 8 girls) were given the patterns with successive configurations whilst the remaining 17 (8 boys, 9 girls) worked on patterns with non-successive configurations. This paper focuses on the students’ performance in just one of the four figural quadratic patterns. Specifically, the success rates, the kind of generalising strategies adopted and the kind of rules generated by the two groups of students will be described in greater detail using examples of students’ generalisations. Overall, about 72% of the students in the two groups combined succeeded in generating a correct functional rule, producing a variety of mathematically equivalent rules using a wide spectrum of generalising strategies.

With the rapid development and increasing use of technology in this twenty-first century, it is important for schools to equip students with both Information Technology (IT) and Information Literacy (IL) skills. Although both IT and IL were Ministry of Education (MOE)-based initiatives, IT initiatives were often adopted and implemented in schools as compared to IL initiatives. It was found in existing research that the lack of IL instructions in schools was mainly due to teachers’ lack of IL knowledge. This paper thus reviewed and analysed IL programmes that were being implemented overseas since the use of IL is clearly lacking in the Singapore context. The suggestions for effective implementation of IL skills in Singapore schools were to introduce an IL course in teacher education and to implement a library period programme for students that is integrated with the school curriculum.

Previous studies have opened up possibilities that linguistic landscape can support classroom learning. The aim of this research paper is to get a glimpse of Singapore teachers’ perspectives of how Linguistic Landscape can play a part in students’ language learning process. The findings of this paper revealed that teachers do see the potential of signboards being educative because of their authenticity nature, but the process of utilising them as a supplementary resource has to be carefully executed by trained teachers in order to fulfil educational goals.