Mukhlis Abu Bakar

This report examines the home and school literacy practices of Malay and Chinese children of different socio-economic background and how these impact on their academic performance upon entering school. It is based on a longitudinal study of the home and school literacy experiences of seven Malay children and seven Chinese children from the time they attended kindergarten until they completed Primary 1 (roughly from 4 to 7 years old). The impetus for the study was in part due to the continuing unequal literacy outcomes between Malay and Chinese students on the one hand, and between students of different socio-economic classes regardless of ethnic groups, on the other. Data analysis show that participant parents, regardless of their socio-economic background, value their children's educational success, want their children to do well in school, and correspondingly see themselves as supporting their children in one way or another. The evidence, however, demonstrates a variation in familial perspectives and needs and a considerable distinction in how families of different background define literacy and which literacy they consider worth transmitting to the children. These in turn affect the way they foster their children's acquisition of literacy.

We describe a recurrent neural network model of rate effects on the syllable-initial voicing distinction, specified by voice-onset-time (VOT). The stimuli were stylized /bi/ and /pi/ syllables covarying in VOT and syllable duration. Network performance revealed a systematic rate effect: as syllable duration increases, the category boundary moves toward longer VOT values, mirroring human performance. Two factors underlie this effect: the range of training stimuli with each VOT and syllable duration, and their frequency of occurrence. The latter influence was particularly strong, consistent with exemplar-based accounts of human category formation.

Sebuah buku yang mengandungi liputan perkembangan bahasa dan persuratan Melayu di Singapura dari zaman kemerdekaan sehingga kini secara terperinci. Buku ini diterbitkan oleh Majlis Bahasa Melayu Singapura sempena 50 tahun kemerdekaan Singapura dan dilancarkan oleh Perdana Menteri Lee Hsien Loong semasa Bulan Bahasa 2015.

Penubuhan Radio Malaya pada tahun 1946 di Singapura merupakan titik penting dalam perkembangan lanjut Sebutan Johor-Riau sebagai sebutan standard bahasa Melayu (SJR) di Malaysia dan Singapura. Bagaimanapun, pada tahun 1993, selaras dengan usaha penyeragaman sebutan bahasa Melayu di nusantara, pemerintah Singapura mengisytiharkan Sebutan Baku (SB) sebagai sebutan baku untuk digunakan di sekolah-sekolah, stesen-stesen penyiaran dan di acara-acara rasmi. Walaupun usaha penyeragaman tersebut gagal, namun, tidak seperti Malaysia yang kembali kepada SJR pada tahun 2000, Singapura mengekalkan SB. Kini, lebih 25 tahun kanak-kanak Melayu Singapura terdidik dengan SB di sekolah. Adakah benar SB itu baku? Apakah sikap dan perasaan anak-anak muda terhadap sebutan ini? Apakah mereka berjaya menguasai dan menggunakannya setelah dewasa? Makalah ini menyelongkar persoalan-persoalan ini dalam rangka sosio-sejarah bahasa orang Melayu Singapura. Konsep SB diteliti semula dan pendapat 100 mahasiswa di universiti-universiti Singapura ditinjau melalui Google Forms. 10 daripada mereka ditemu bual dan percakapan mereka dalam SB dirakam. Dapatan menunjukkan walaupun responden akur SB mudah dipelajari, mereka menganggap SJR lebih mewakili orang Melayu Singapura. Mereka lebih mengaitkan diri mereka dengan SJR kerana terbiasa dengan sebutan itu dan oleh itu mudah menuturkannya. Pengucapan SB yang dirakam pula menunjukkan sebutan yang hibrid, iaitu campuran SB dan SJR. Hanya bunyi ‘a’ di suku kata akhir terbuka disebut secara konsisten mengikut SB; bunyi lain (‘i’ dan ‘u’ di suku kata akhir tertutup; ‘r’ di akhir suku kata) dipengaruhi SJR. Makalah ini diakhiri dengan perbincangan mengenai implikasi daripada kajian, khususnya dari sudut matlamat pendidikan bahasa Melayu dan identiti orang Melayu Singapura dari segi sebutan.

Prior to the 1990s, the Singapore government did not pay very close attention to the religious dimension of the Malay/Muslim community life. Problems pertaining to madrasah education were internal to the Malay/Muslim community, engaging the attention of the Malay community and religious leaders and of most Malay political leaders within the government. Today these issues are national concerns because of their impact on economic development, national integration, and security. This chapter examines the tensions between the state and Islam, focusing on Singapore’s Malay/Muslim community and its religious educational institutions at a time of rapid and complex economic, social, and religious developments. It presents a perspective on the connections between education, religion, race, economy, and nation building within the context of Singapore’s multi-religious, pluralistic, and modern society.

This paper reports on one particular finding which emerged from a Singapore study of young Muslim children attending the last year of a four-year Islamic education weekend program. The program provides the 5–8-year-old young learners with a learning environment in which they not only memorise Qur’anic verses but also learn the relevance of Islamic values and practices in their daily lives through activities which are age-appropriate. Learning in the program is perceived to be holistic in that it recognises the roles of thinking (cognitive), feeling (affective) and reflecting (spiritual) as complementary within the learning process. Children’s account of what they have learnt suggests the emergence of the interplay between these learning dimensions. Such interplay, as argued in this paper, may lead to transformative learning experiences even as the program itself is concerned with a particular outcome (i.e., convergence with the Islamic worldview).

Educating a child spiritually has been the domain of the family, while provision of religious education, an extension of the child’s religious upbringing. However, religious education, as with any type of education, is never the independent or neutral imparting of information in relation to the teaching and learning of texts and languages but rather it projects power relations. This paper reports on Muslim parents’ beliefs on what is appropriate religious education for their children as they express their opinion on the pedagogy and curriculum of the state-approved Islamic religious education programme that their children attend. It is part of a larger study of two weekend Islamic religious education programmes for young Muslim children. In the semi-structured interviews with parents of 20 children, two lines of argument can be discerned: one is the desire to nurture what Boyle would consider an embodied spirituality, the other an attempt at cultivating good citizenry. The paper concludes with a discussion on the aims and practice of religious education and how it is impacted by the increasingly interconnected and shrinking global world.

Children learn about literacy through their interactions with more experienced members of the culture (teachers, parents, siblings, peers, extended family members, etc.) in a process of guided participation (Rogoff, 1990). This means that their learning of literacy occurs in participation with and is mediated by others in culturally valued activities. Differences in what the members count as literacy and which literacy they consider worth transmitting to children affects the latter’s literacy learning and their disposition to texts. This paper presents data from two families with different approaches to literacy learning. In one family, the child is exposed to meaning-based activities in literacy instruction where the parents and other adult members engage in extended discourse around texts and encourage intertextual references. In another family, the child learns that literacy means learning the grammar of reading and writing (decoding, punctuation and intonation), a practice that appears to cohere with the family’s devotion to learning to recite religious texts and perform religious rituals where meaning and comprehension are often relegated to a secondary activity. The two children will enter school with fairly different cultural resources towards literacy learning, and their educational attainment will depend on how teachers make efficient use of these resources and design pedagogies that meet the needs of different children.

This chapter reports on research conducted in Singapore that revisits a two-year study on the lived literacy experience of eight Malay children who were preschoolers when the researcher first met them. 12 years on, the researcher reunited with two of them who are now young adults. This chapter wades through data from both phases of the study in an attempt to answer the question: What does it take to be literate in school-sanctioned ways, what are the challenges that children face, and to what extent these relate to school outcome? In the process, the author attempts to link the experiences of these three children with his own literacy trajectory within his own sociocultural and sociolinguistic spaces, and tease out the similarities and differences between them. The author’s biographical narrative provides another layer of meaning to the relationship between cultural capital and school outcome, and between structure and agency.