Educational Research AY2019/2020

The rising number of sporting inactivity in Singapore highlights the need to look more closely into measures to encourage continued sports participation. Studies have shown that positive relationship between sporting experiences as a child and adult exercise behaviour. Therefore, PE teachers play a crucial role in creating an environment that builds students’ autonomous motivation; an essential component for continued participation in sports and physical activity. This study was designed to systematically review literatures related to autonomy-supportive intervention programme (ASIP) with PE teachers. After conducting an intensive search on various databases and removing duplicates, 10 studies were identified and included for further analysis. Overall, the ASIP was effective in increasing teachers’ autonomy-supportive behaviour thereby fostering more self-determined forms of motivation towards sports and physical activity amongst children and adolescent. Hence, it is recommended for Singapore PE teachers to participate in ASIP to develop a more autonomy-supportive teaching style.

Many research efforts that were placed on collaboration scripts over the years focused on enhancing the collaborative learning process and its impact on the domain learning. This literature review examined the use of collaboration scripts specifically in the Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environment in Singapore’s Chinese language classroom. The analysis was based on 30 studies published between 2009 and 2019. Findings from the analysis showed that collaboration scripts are commonly used in CSCL Chinese language learning lesson, with macro scripts more frequently used than micro scripts. Furthermore, results showed that collaboration scripts were more frequently used in vocabulary learning lessons in primary schools and writing lessons in secondary schools. The current study highlights the benefits of supporting Chinese language learning with collaboration script. The need for more focus on micro-scripting to help learners acquire the target language is discussed.

The present study was designed to investigate students’ patterns of Tamil language usage over development and Tamil teachers’ attitudes towards Tamil. The study centred on exploring the factors that were expected to affect students’ use of Tamil. The study included teachers from various grade levels and the participants were asked to complete an online survey. The study revealed that teachers believe oral language development and developing speaking skills are the most relevant purposes of teaching. It also revealed that home support, early oral language development and confidence are key contributors to students’ Tamil language usage.

This paper examines how primary school pupils in Singapore use language in group work. Using a combination of sociocultural discourse analysis, linguistic analysis, and contextual pedagogic analysis, one primary 1 and one primary 3 group’s interactions during their English lessons were analysed in detail. Looking specifically into how pupils’ language indicate their metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness, the analyses suggest the importance of language competence in enabling more effective group talk about language. At the same time, in this multilingual context, metalinguistic awareness often appears not in the form of academic language but rather in a conversational, non-standard Singapore Colloquial English. The study also finds that pupils’ over-emphasis on task completion and grammar might disrupt development of metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness.