Sally Ann Jones

This article proposes a pedagogic innovation in teacher education by articulating a method for writing learning outcomes for English language lessons in multilingual school contexts. The argument for this approach is founded on curriculum studies; however, the practice also draws specifically on applied psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic theories of teaching and learning the English language. Examples support this five-step process of writing learning outcomes in detailing how to identify a focus, specify language, ensure appropriateness, create coherence, and revise. While the approach addresses the difficulties research studies report that experienced teachers encounter in lesson planning, here it is offered as a way of educating novice teachers to clarify their ideas about language teaching and assessment through reflection. Additionally, the process serves as a means for teachers to develop greater language awareness as subject content knowledge. This technique of writing learning outcomes for language lessons, therefore, may assist in developing language teacher professionalism.

This article, drawing on research which aimed to explore how young children read English in Singapore, demonstrates how 9-year-old Singaporean children's voluntary reading of series books served the dual purposes of enabling their membership of the peer group through culturated reading and the independent development of their reading skills and motivation for reading. Using interviews to encourage conversation and reflection, the research examined children’s book choices and their reasons for reading. This formed part of a topic-focussed ethnographic study in three primary schools. In addition, the article seeks to prove that Singaporean children’s choice of series books makes them readers with potential for global, intra-generational, cultural connections rather than familial, intergenerational ones, and it is especially significant educationally for less well-off families where English is not the dominant home language.

Pictures, as well as written discourse, convey meanings. However, the capacity of visuals as meaning making resource is often overlooked such that visuals in picture books are not given significant attention. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore visual and discourse interaction, specifically in children’s picture books by Anthony Browne. Visual literacy was adopted for visual analysis while critical literacy was adopted for discourse analysis. The findings indicated that the visuals in Anthony Browne’s children’s picture books convey meanings that can either support or contradict its accompanying discourse.

This paper focusses on the process of learning mathematics in primary school from the perspectives of 62 girls aged seven to eleven. For many of these Singaporean girls, English is not the dominant home language, but they all learn mathematics in English. Despite the fact that achievement in mathematics is high nationally, girls appear to be less confident than boys. Adopting notions of identity and agency at the intersection of language and gender, the paper explores how the girls oriented themselves and others to the figured world of school mathematics as successful or not through their interaction in focus group interviews. While some were confident in their mastery of the subject, for some others, the discipline, its language, and other artefacts, such as model drawing and assessment, restricted and frustrated them. Girls experienced a sense of security in their own fellowship and appreciated considerate pedagogies, such as space for individual agency and for improvisation and expression of language, through which they could achieve understanding and progress.

This study, situated in a multilingual, English-medium educational context, draws on theory from mathematics and language education to capture teachers’ perspectives on the place of language in their mathematics pedagogy. The benchmark study explored this topic through surveying and interviewing teachers. Additionally, it sought to relate teacher’s views to their practice by focusing on observing three teachers’ mathematics lessons at primary one, three, and five. Findings are that mathematics teachers placed importance on teaching language, being specifically concerned with language as input and comprehension. They taught vocabulary and reading skills in supportive ways explicitly yet differently at the three grade levels. Particularly at the lower levels, teachers contextualized language in the concrete examples employed for mathematics teaching. At all three levels, prominence was given to teaching pupils how to read word problems as well as how to solve them. However, at primary three, a tension was observed between the two aims of teaching mathematical vocabulary and teaching the reading skills for word problems. This paper illustrates the tension and discusses its possible causes.