Girls becoming mathematicians: Identity and agency in the figured world of the English-medium primary school
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.
A local research evidence base for English language education (ELE) in Singapore from 2010 to 2020 (early childhood to secondary school)
This article is a review of research in English language education (ELE) in multilingual Singapore from 2010 to 2020. Most research activity has been in the areas of reading and writing while the least has been in speaking and listening and learning spaces. Some findings show how students may be distanced from learning and how complex thinking is constrained in classrooms. Others show the productive nature of metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness and linguistic transfer, suggesting pedagogic approaches of assessment for learning (AfL), scaffolding, and translanguaging to personalize teaching. Factors which influence teacher and student adoption of technologies are revealed by research in e-pedagogies and multiliteracies. Fresh avenues of study have been identity and spatial research which have produced knowledge about agency, diversity, and relations between schools, homes, and communities. Additionally, teacher knowledge and beliefs about texts, metalanguage of the subject, and theories of linguistic and conceptual development evidently require extending. Overall, this decade of research prompts a conceptual opening-up of ELE in Singapore for the next decade in recognition of participant agency and knowledge construction over the networked variety of spaces of ELE.