O'Brien Beth Ann

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.

This study seeks to address the problem of providing additional support to pupils with reading difficulties by raising teacher competence in providing high quality reading instruction so that teachers can address the needs of struggling readers as early as possible. If classroom teachers assume active responsibility for delivering reading instruction consistently prior to referring pupils for psycho-educational assessment, struggling readers can be helped before their difficulties impede their learning.
Results of a pilot study conducted in 2013 by the principal investigator of the current proposed study using a Start-Up Grant (SUG) provide further insights into the current situation in school. A peer tutoring programme was modified from the Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) programme (Fuchs, Fuchs, Mathes, & Simmons, 1997 ) based on feedback from teachers. It was implemented in three classes using STELLAR (or Strategies for English Language Learning and Reading) materials in a pilot school. Findings from the study suggested that peer tutoring generally benefitted pupils who were able to read fairly independently. However, for pupils whose reading ability was significantly below that of their peers, another tier of support was needed. Based on the results of SUG study, a two-tiered approach was proposed as a framework to support pupils with reading difficulties. What is unique about the current study compared to other learning support programme available in schools in Singapore is the application of academic problem solving. The LSP and Reading Remediation Programme use a standard protocol approach. While the standard protocol approach is generally effective, the data-based decision making component of the academic problem solving allows teachers to provide interventions which are targeted to address individual students’ reading difficulties based on their progress monitoring data. Using academic problem solving, we were able to use progress monitoring data to determine students’ reading difficulties and the extent to which they were responding to interventions. Interventions which were targeted to address specific reading difficulties were then delivered and monitored.

“This synthesis examines language learning and teaching with a focus on Singapore’s official Mother Tongue languages and bilingualism as understood in the local school system. It covers research funded during the third tranche (2013–2017) of the Education Research Funding Programme (ERFP).”—Overview.

Bilingualism is becoming more common worldwide, and it remains a central educational policy in Singapore. In this document, we review research related to bilingualism and literacy development and achievement. Following an ecological framework, we outline known factors contributing to literacy achievement and discuss findings from bilingual research regarding these factors. We conclude with recommendations for educational practice informed by the research literature.

Syntax is a core component of linguistic knowledge, and a key diagnostic index for difficulty in language development. For bilingual children, the language systems that they learn may be more or less contrastive in their syntactic features. The languages learned by the bilingual children in the current study, English and Chinese, differ in several important syntactic properties (e.g., marking of mass-count distinction and tense/aspect features). Therefore, their development in terms of grammatical knowledge may differ from that reported for monolinguals.
In this exploratory study, we focus on linguistic features that are relevant to the age group of the participants, and that are also important for their literacy development and academic performance. Thus, of interest is the general level of syntactic complexity of children's Chinese, their grasp of specific morphosyntactic features, and how their background variables (e.g., relative language dominance) might affect their syntactic knowledge. To address the research questions, this study focuses on data collected through an expressive language task for Mandarin Chinese at the entry of primary school.