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Gender differences in the reading habits and attitudes of primary pupils in single-sex government-aided schools in Singapore
Author
Seah, Hui Ling
Supervisor
Kramer-Dahl, Anneliese
Abstract
Amongst the studies on students' reading practices carried out in Singapore, few of them have sought to investigate their gendered nature. Of those, most were conducted with post-primary readers and in co-educational contexts. This study, with its focus on primary school students in single-sex schools, attempts to fill this gap in gender and reading research in Singapore. More importantly, it heeds the call of those more recent gender and literacy investigations elsewhere which have advocated an approach to gender as a variable intersecting with others, in this case, the type of school. This, in turn, in the Singapore context, is a highly complex factor, as it is intricately linked with the pupils' family and social background such as their socio-economic status, their parents' education and occupation.
As the purpose of this study is to explore in greater detail the reading habits and attitudes of a particular group of boys and girls who attend single-sex primary schools through (a) ascertaining the kinds of texts that they enjoy reading at home and in school, and their reasons for doing so; and (b) identifying the activities they like to engage in that might compete with time otherwise set aside for reading, both quantitative and qualitative research methods were employed to collect the necessary data from the participants.
Drawing on questionnaire, reading logs and focus group discussion data from boys and girls in two single-sex government-aided schools, the findings align with those of previous research in several ways; the girls reported devoting more of their time to reading than the boys; certain types of reading are found to be associated with different family members, in rather gendered ways; sharing and discussing reading materials with family members is not a common practice among the participants; and boys are under stronger pressure than girls to conform to certain socially accepted gender behaviours.
There are novel patterns that emerged in the findings as well. Significantly, some of the text type preferences and the reasons for certain preferences exhibited by the participants were rather unexpected : girls' interest in comic reading; boys' interest in the romance genre as opposed to girls' rejection of them; and the girls' fascination with computer games. This study suggests that such reading behaviour that goes against established gender norms could perhaps at least partly be attributed to the single-sex school variable and the related factors with which it interacts. This study also indicates that there is an increasing gap between school-based reading and outside school reading for this group of boys and girls. In its concluding chapter, this study discusses avenues for future research and explores pedagogical implications, most importantly how to reshape some of the existing approaches to reading in school in order to bridge the gap between students' textual engagements in and out-of-school.
As the purpose of this study is to explore in greater detail the reading habits and attitudes of a particular group of boys and girls who attend single-sex primary schools through (a) ascertaining the kinds of texts that they enjoy reading at home and in school, and their reasons for doing so; and (b) identifying the activities they like to engage in that might compete with time otherwise set aside for reading, both quantitative and qualitative research methods were employed to collect the necessary data from the participants.
Drawing on questionnaire, reading logs and focus group discussion data from boys and girls in two single-sex government-aided schools, the findings align with those of previous research in several ways; the girls reported devoting more of their time to reading than the boys; certain types of reading are found to be associated with different family members, in rather gendered ways; sharing and discussing reading materials with family members is not a common practice among the participants; and boys are under stronger pressure than girls to conform to certain socially accepted gender behaviours.
There are novel patterns that emerged in the findings as well. Significantly, some of the text type preferences and the reasons for certain preferences exhibited by the participants were rather unexpected : girls' interest in comic reading; boys' interest in the romance genre as opposed to girls' rejection of them; and the girls' fascination with computer games. This study suggests that such reading behaviour that goes against established gender norms could perhaps at least partly be attributed to the single-sex school variable and the related factors with which it interacts. This study also indicates that there is an increasing gap between school-based reading and outside school reading for this group of boys and girls. In its concluding chapter, this study discusses avenues for future research and explores pedagogical implications, most importantly how to reshape some of the existing approaches to reading in school in order to bridge the gap between students' textual engagements in and out-of-school.
Date Issued
2003
Call Number
LB1050 Sea
Date Submitted
2003