Teo, Peter

This proposed study focuses on a key competency in the 21st century landscape -- critical thinking -- as it is manifest in the classroom talk of pre university students in Singapore's Junior College (JC) system. 'Critical thinking' here refers to the students' ability and willingness to question and challenge views and opinions. More broadly, it describes a classroom culture which encourages students to actively participate in discussion and debate as part of the process of knowledge (de)construction. The purpose of the study is to explore the dialogic space in Singapore pre-university classrooms to ascertain the extent to which teachers and students are able to co construct knowledge and learning. Through observations and systematic analysis of classroom talk in General Paper lessons in five selected junior colleges in Singapore, the study aims to produce findings that will fill several important gaps. First, it attempts to make visible and explicit the process of knowledge construction amidst the vagaries of classroom talk by probing into the discursive structures of dialogic teaching. By adapting a coding scheme aimed at making transparent and explicit the nature and workings of dialogic teaching, the study hopes to contribute to our understanding of how students can be steered towards constructing their own knowledge rather than simply assimilating knowledge transmitted to them by their teacher. Secondly, there is a dearth of empirical data on pre-university classroom teaching in Singapore, as most classroom corpora tend to focus on primary or secondary levels of schooling. Seen as the crucial, preparatory stage for university education, education at the pre-university level therefore constitutes a vital link to the academic literacies that students at the university level are expected to possess and display. The findings of this study will illuminate not only the teaching of a key subject in Singapore's junior college curriculum, but also potentially of different disciplines due to the inter-disciplinary nature of General Paper. Thirdly, the proposed study will also contribute significantly towards preparing students for the 21st century, since one of its key competencies relates to critical thinking. Finally, the corpus of classroom data collected, both audio and video, will constitute valuable capacity-building resources for pre-service teacher education or even professional development of in-service teachers. The findings will make teacher educators themselves more cognizant of how teacher talk drives learning, leading hopefully to the reshaping of curricular content to focus more sharply on the important role of classroom talk in education.

This article focuses on the discursive self-promotion of universities. It aims to investigate how universities make evaluations through linguistic resources that modulate the degree of attitudinal and experiential meaning expression in discourse. The study compares the use of Graduation resources (Martin and White, 2005) in the About Us texts of 160 top- and second-tier universities in China and America. Cross-country and cross-tier comparisons are made by determining the frequencies of the Graduation resources and performing a close analysis of the functions and features of these resources. Findings show that all 160 universities frequently use upscaled Graduation resources to amplify the positivity projected by existing attitudes and to invoke positive evaluations to realize the universities' pragmatic intent of self-promotion. While the top-tier Chinese universities forge the most authoritative institutional image and most distant relationship with readers, the second-tier American universities establish the least authoritative institutional image and closest relationship with their readers. These findings are discussed in light of various factors that co-constitute the ecologies of higher education.