Chia, Alexius Ti Yong

Recent research on literacy and schooling has focused on the need for further inquiry into the role gender plays in shaping children's attitudes and their participation in literacy practices at school. While there exists a body of research that asserts that boys and girls acquire literacy differently and hence become differently literate, much of the work has been done in countries like Australia, Britain, Canada and the US. Little is known about the Singapore school context. this research study attempts to fill this gap by investigating and analyzing the reading and writing preferences of a group of Singapore school children for gender differences.

The research was carried out with two classes of Secondary Three Express Stream pupils from a local secondary school; and the methodology to uncover gender differences involved a survey on the pupils' reading preferences, group interviews and analyses of examination documents and stories written by the pupils.

The findings indicated that the boys and girls had markedly different reading preferences and produced significantly different stories. For example, the girls who were seen to read much more than the boys were found to have very different tastes in the kinds of subject areas that they chose to read. Many of the narratives that were written by the girls were perceived to be superior to the boys' because they often contained single Complications and the building up of characters and their psychological make-up - i.e. features found to be highly valued by teachers and UCLES examiners. Very few of the boys' narratives displayed these features. In its conclusion, this dissertation also examined claims of the possible links between reading and writing. These links, together with the gendered differences uncovered, were found to have significant bearing on school literacy and performance, especially in subject English.

The shift in multimodality and multiliteracies in the English curriculum has become more a need than a choice. With the advent of ‘new’ media and advancing technology, learning scopes have broadened significantly. Methodologies and pedagogies will have to be redefined and re-established to accommodate the over-flowing sources of accessible knowledge. The main issue is that schools and universities, as Hull and Nelson (2005) argued, are still “staunchly logocentric, book centered, and essay driven” (p.225). More than a decade after this assertion, these new forms of literacies appear to have some impact on teaching and learning. However, the inclusion of multimodal text analyses in school-based assessment seems to be lagging. This paper discusses the shift towards multimodality and multiliteracies and their possible impact and implications on the English curriculum. It proposes the alignment of a re-conceptualized English curriculum which infuses the teaching and learning of visuals and technology and the assessment of multimodal texts.

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.

This study is an explorative and descriptive investigation of how three teachers account for their pedagogical practices when enacting the Lower Secondary Science (LSS) Syllabus and the extent to which these accounts are made visible in their classrooms. Taking a socio-cultural perspective, this study is underpinned by two theoretical concepts – ‘pedagogical practice’ (Baker & Johnson, 1998; Freiberg & Freebody, 1995) and ‘layers of mediation’ (Luke, 2005a). The specific questions driving my study are as follows:

In the light of the recent changes in the Singapore science curriculum,
1. how do teachers account for their pedagogical practices in the lower secondary science classroom? and
2. to what extent are their accounts made visible in their classroom instruction?

These questions have been answered by interviewing, and observing the lessons of, three lower secondary science teachers in a government school. The accounts provided in the interviews and the interactions observed in the lessons are subjected to fine-grained qualitative analyses. For the investigation of the science teachers’ accounts, this study employed the analytical approach of Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) – a branch of Ethnomethodology (Freebody, 2003; Freiberg and Freebody, 1995; Gunn, Forrest and Freebody, 1995). In line with Freiberg and Freebody’s (1995) framework, the teachers’ accounts were used as an essential backdrop for reading and analyzing the transcripts of their science lessons. The latter were examined for their production of what counts as scientific knowledge and practices in the teachers’ classroom. Hence, features of the lesson talk like exchange structure and nature of teacher questions were analyzed. The detailed analyses of the interview talk and classroom interaction transcripts surfaced a number of issues of broader relevance surrounding the challenges of curricular reform. Many of these issues confirm the findings from past research studies, others have expanded and deepened current understandings of the issues.

The findings have been organized into the broad themes derived from the bringing together of common and related categories and their accompanying attributes evoked in the teachers’ accounts of their pedagogical practice. The themes which have been assembled are ‘The Neighbourhood School Student’, ‘Institutional and Systemic Factors’ and ‘Teacher Habitus’. The findings suggest that a divide exists between ‘neighbourhood schools’ and ‘top schools’ – heard largely through the teachers’ attributions accorded to the students which attend them. The ‘neighbourhood school student’ is constructed as unmotivated and lacking in skills necessary to cope with 21st Century schooling; the ‘top school’ student is described as motivated, independent, self-directed and possessing the relevant skills to deal with the demands of school. These contrastive attributions were then employed by the teachers to justify the employment of different ways of instructing these sets of students. These claims were visible in the interaction patterns they employed in their classroom lessons.

Another recurring theme, which emerged from the interviews, is that of institutional and systemic factors – high‐stakes examinations, time constraints, curricular factors – which come to bear on the teachers’ enactment of the LSS Syllabus. These perceived pressures are seen to pull the teachers in different directions. The influence of these pressures was evident again in the teachers’ choice of pedagogical actions in their classroom lessons. They continued to perpetuate rather traditional ways of teaching (e.g. whole class monologic lecture, closed IRE questioning), which run contrary to the LSS Syllabus aims of promoting an inquiry-based curriculum.

The assembly of individual histories of the science teachers – from home, to school and university, through teacher training – was organized under the theme of ‘Teacher Habitus’. The findings from the analysis of their accounts reveal how their past experiences with science are able to shed light on their current beliefs and assumptions about science teaching, and these are seen to impact upon the current activity structures and interaction patterns in their classrooms.

The study concludes that teachers cannot successfully enact an inquiry-based curriculum if they do not change the discourse patterns in their classrooms. However, even if they are willing to do so, it is likely that they will adapt them to their familiar patterns of interacting, given the entrenched nature of these patterns, and the knowledge and values embedded within them.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine five Secondary English Language teachers’ perceptions and practices of multiliteracies teaching in the context of a decade after multiliteracies was introduced into the English Language syllabus in Singapore. Design/methodology/approach Adopting a case study approach, the authors observed 12 multiliteracies lessons taught by the five teacher participants across three secondary schools. The classroom data included field notes and video-recordings of the lessons. The authors also conducted pre-lesson and post-lesson interviews with the teachers to understand their beliefs and the rationale behind their classroom practices. The video-recordings of the lessons and audio-recordings of the interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using thematic coding. Findings The authors identify an essentialising of multiliteracies to the skills of viewing and representing with multimodal texts, as well as a sense of uncertainty amongst the teachers towards the teaching of multiliteracies. In terms of practices, the authors observed an attempt to connect with the students’ life-worlds through the use of authentic materials, but often only in service of language learning. The authors also highlight the constraining influence of assessment on shaping multiliteracies learning. The findings of this study resonate with the conclusions that some of the earlier studies reported on teachers’ perceptions and practices of multiliteracies teaching. This resonation suggests perennial issues and challenges which remain unresolved. Research limitations/implications This study is limited by the number of participants as well as the selected lessons the authors observed. The schools, while selected because they were considered as mid-range public schools in Singapore, were also not representative of all Singapore schools. As such, the authors acknowledge that the generalisability of the findings from this study is limited. Practical implications The issues raised in this study resonate with the findings from previous studies both from Singapore and around the world. The persistence of these concerns over time and space that remain unresolved demands attention and concerted action from policymakers, curriculum developers and education researchers, to address the challenges in multiliteracies teaching and learning. Originality/value This study was conducted a decade after the launch of the English Language Syllabus 2010, which first incorporated multiliteracies into the curriculum. This study examines the teachers’ perceptions and practices in relation to the policy intent. The implications from this study are relevant to educators interested in integrating multiliteracies in the literacy curriculum internationally.