Options
Out-of-school literacy practices of four low-achieving students in Singapore
Author
Foo, Xiao Chih
Supervisor
Teo, Peter
Abstract
This is a study of the out-of-school literacy practices of four students in the Normal (Technical) N(T) stream of a boys’ school in Singapore. The purpose is to examine the extent to which students’ out-of-school literacy practices may be incorporated into the classroom by taking into account the realities of the Singapore education system, existing classroom practices, teachers’ concerns, and implementation issues. Literacy, viewed through a sociocultural lens, is perceived as a set of social practices and values undergirding any event that involves the use of text, where text is broadly defined as the use of any representational system to communicate meaning. A multi-case study approach was adopted to collect interview, observation and documentary data from the four participants, their teachers and parents. Data was analysed using a two-tiered approach: first, using Stake’s (1995) direct interpretation approach, followed by theoretical framing informed by Halliday’s theory of the metafunctions of language. The four participants were found to draw on a rich array of multimodal resources to construct meaning and build relationships as they participated in communities built around shared affinities. The connection between literacy use, meaning-making and community participation shows that language learning is meaningful when deployed towards purposeful social ends. This study goes beyond rehabilitating struggling / reluctant learners as competent language users, or repositioning adolescent interest domains as rich contexts for literacy development, to recommend changes to teaching and learning to facilitate the integration of students’ out-of-school literacy practices into formal educational settings. These recommendations drew on situated learning, multimodal and collaborative knowledge construction pedagogies, and pointed out the implications for materials development, teacher capacity-building, assessment and design of learning environments. This study contends that while standardised testing remains the lodestone of Singapore’s current education policy, teachers nevertheless possess the agency to effect local modifications to the teaching and learning that take place in the classroom that goes beyond mere drilling and testing.
Date Issued
2013
Call Number
LC4661 Foo
Date Submitted
2013