OER - Reports

Sebutan Baku (Standard Pronunciation) was officially introduced and promoted as the standard pronunciation for use with spoken standard Malay in Singapore in 1993 replacing the previous standard that developed from the Johor-Riau dialect (henceforth referred to as Johor-Riau Standard). Since then, Sebutan Baku has been taught in schools, adopted by the media, and prescribed to be used in formal occasions where Standard Malay is expected. In 2012, almost two decades after Sebutan Baku was introduced, Mr Masagos Zulkifli Masagos Mohamed, the then Chairman of the Malay Language Council of Singapore and Minister of Home Affairs and Foreign Affairs, has asked whether this standard pronunciation has been fully acquired by the Malay community in Singapore, and if not, how it can be perfected. The proposed project aims to provide part of the answer to the first of the questions. This project is a two-year exploratory, mixed-method study that aims to obtain an understanding of the place of Sebutan Baku in Malay students' spoken language in schools in Singapore. Using a questionnaire survey, we plan to elicit information from Secondary 3 students from four schools in all the streams Express, Normal (Academic), Normal (Technical) about their spoken language practices and their views on, and identification with, Sebutan Baku. Using a case-based approach, we plan to enroll 24 of these students as focal participants spread across the four schools to observe and record their actual use of Malay within the classroom setting as they interact with their teachers and peers during Malay Language lessons. Separate interviews will be held with these case studies students and their teachers to gain a better insight into the students' attitude towards, and identification with, Sebutan Baku. Finally, a phonetic analysis of the focal students' utterances in Malay will be carried out to find out the accuracy of their Sebutan Baku pronunciation. The aim is to understand, the place of Sebutan Baku in the learning and teaching of the Malay language in the classroom, the students' attitude towards, and identification with, Sebutan Baku, and the accuracy of students' Sebutan Baku and that of those they directly interact with in class. Findings from the study will help the Ministry of Education to gauge the extent to which students have embraced and accurately acquired Sebutan Baku, and to take appropriate measures if necessary. The second of the Minister's questions is reserved for a possible follow-up study, focusing on students in primary schools where the teaching and learning of Sebutan Baku are actively enacted.

We report on the Phase 2 research activities and findings of the NIE/OER Educational Research Funding Programme and MOE CORE 3 project titled 'Integrating Multiliteracies into the English Language Classroom'. The project has two Phases: Phase 1 from March 2019 to December 2019 and Phase 2 from January 2020 to December 2021.

The purpose of this project is first to understand how multiliteracies, specifically multimodal literacy, are currently taught in the English Language subject classroom in Singapore schools and then second, to develop an instructional approach, informed by Systemic Functional Theory, multiliteracies, and multimodality studies, to teach multimodal literacy for upper primary and lower secondary students.

The study adopts a design-based research approach which involved the team of researchers working closely with the teacher-participants in the co-design of lesson packages. The goal of design-based research is to develop contextually-sensitive pedagogical practices and instructional strategies with a focus on the teacherparticipants’ professional learning and growth in the process.

Leisure reading has been consistently shown to be closely related to children's success during school years and beyond (Iyengar & Ball, 2007; Sullivan & Brown, 2015). Research has also shown that good reading habits can lead to better reading achievement (Clark & De Zoysa, 2011, PIRLS, 2006, 2011, 2016). In light of the proven benefits of leisure reading, language curricula in many education systems, including Singapore, are paying increasing attention to nurture children's love for reading, and large-scale national surveys have been carried out to understand how children practise and perceive reading. The bulk of extant research, however, fail to take account of the potential heterogeneity of participants' language backgrounds, instead focusing exclusively on English or on the schooling language of the research setting (e.g., Loh & Sun, 2018a; National Endowment for the Arts, 2007; Rutherford, Merga, & Singleton, 2018; Zasacka, 2014). Relatively little research has taken a holistic approach to examine bilingual children's reading habits and preferences in their two languages concurrently. Building on an ongoing SUG project, the proposed study aims to conduct a mixed methods study to better understand Singaporean bilingual children's reading habits and preferences in English and their respective Mother Tongue languages. Results from the survey will not only provide important and timely understanding of how bilingual children in Singapore practise leisure reading in their two languages, but also contribute to the knowledge base for designing and evaluating reading programmes as well as tracking down changes in bilingual children's reading habits and preferences.