Pillai, Anitha Devi

The National Institute of Education (NIE) is the provider of teacher education in Singapore and is an institution within the Nanyang Technological University; NIE is simultaneously accountable to the Ministry of Education in Singapore. A Communication Skills for Teachers course (CST) was introduced for all pre-service teachers at NIE in July 2005. A catalyst for the development of this course, which focuses on speaking and writing skills, was the perception that the standard of English of Singaporean teachers had declined. Since 2010, the course has been offered as a blended course and increasingly, several aspects of course administration have also been conducted online. The two main areas of assessment for the course are an oral presentation and a written test. In order to ensure that grading is consistent, standardisation meetings for these tests are important but not always possible given the tutors’ varied schedules. This paper outlines the development and implementation of online standardisation for the written assessment component of the CST course. Utilising collaborative tools for standardisation saves time and reduces the need for face-to-face meetings for this important aspect of assessment.

The paper examines the research project task expectations of university student writers. It offers a detailed analysis of the rhetorical Moves that are likely to occur in university-level research paper prompts. The analysis highlights that while, some Moves such as Background information and Assessment expectations are optional, others like Cognitive demands on students are obligatory, and that an Overview of task and Procedural directions are desirable traits of prompts. A transitivity analysis of the prompts, student interviews and reflections revealed that despite the prescriptive tone and the heavy cognitive and rhetorical demands made on student writers, the prompts did not alienate the novices who were on the whole receptive to the requirements specified by the instructors.