Sun, Baoqi

Students’ learning is deeply rooted in both home and school environments. This necessitates a person-and-context perspective that considers individual, home, and school factors. This study delved into second language learning, an area inherently intertwined with these settings. Utilizing hierarchical linear modeling, the study involved 2,310 fifth-grade English–Chinese bilingual students and 109 teachers across 109 classrooms in 23 Singaporean primary schools where Chinese is taught as a second language. We examined the class compositional effect of Chinese use at home on students’ Chinese language achievement and the cross-level interactions between classroom goal structures (mastery and performance goal structures) and Chinese use at home in predicting Chinese language achievement. Aggregated class-level Chinese use at home exhibited a compositional effect on students’ Chinese language achievement. Additionally, the class-level Chinese use at home strengthened the positive relation between individual students’ home language use and their achievement in Chinese. Moreover, classroom mastery goal structure demonstrated significant moderating effects on the relation between students’ Chinese use at home and Chinese language achievement. While Chinese use at home was positively related to achievement, this relation was weaker in classes with high mastery goal structure and stronger in classes with low mastery goal structure. No main effect or interaction effect concerning classroom performance goal structure was observed. These findings highlight the intricate relation between home language exposure and classroom goal structures. Being surrounded by peers who use the second language often at home may enhance second language achievement. Furthermore, mastery-focused environments may compensate for students with limited second language exposure at home.

Adopting an explanatory sequential mixed methods design, this study examined Singaporean primary school students’ changes in reading enjoyment, reading amount, and their access to resources in print and digital formats during the COVID-19 school closure. Survey data showed reading was a more preferred leisure activity during the school closure. Students’ reading enjoyment prior to the closure was positively correlated with changes in their reading enjoyment and reading amount during the closure, for both print and digital formats. Despite the ubiquity of devices, devices were underutilised for reading purposes. Students demonstrated a clear preference for print reading over reading digitally both before and during the school closure and relied more on home than online resources for reading materials. Changes in time spent on devices during school closure were not related to changes in digital reading amount, but negatively related to changes in reading enjoyment and print reading amount over the same period, suggesting more time on devices may not naturally lead to more reading digitally. Qualitative results revealed several challenges students faced with reading digitally. While students were digital natives in terms of using technology for entertainment purposes, they had difficulty locating digital reading materials as few students were socialised into using technology for reading. When it comes to reading, we propose that primary school students are print natives who are generally more familiar with reading in print and prefer print. Some inherent limitations of digital reading that restrict continuous reading (e.g., eye strain, reliance on power supply, cumbersome navigability) may prevent students from embracing the new form of reading.

With increased access to technologies for reading, more understanding is needed about how adolescents engage with print and digital reading across school and out-of-school contexts. In this study, mobile ethnography was used to document the everyday print and digital reading practices of adolescent girls from one all-girls’ school. They responded to real-time researcher prompts about their reading across various timings, locations, and devices over four days, and participated in photo-elicitation interviews. Findings showed that as students moved between locations, they also transited across devices, platforms, and formats, making use of different print and digital resources for varied ways of reading. Their ability to ‘style-shift’ flexibly across the boundaries of school and personal spaces, various devices and platforms allowed them to independently optimise reading as a resource for their everyday leisure, information seeking, and learning purposes. Insights, implications, and challenges for learning in a post-pandemic digital age are discussed.

Given constant online access to information, critical news literacy, or the ability to access and critically evaluate the news, is essential for adolescents to learn about the world and obtain civic knowledge to participate as national and global citizens. Although there has been much research focusing on how youths critically read and produce media, less attention has been paid to the issue of access as an essential element of news literacy. Drawing on survey data (N = 5732) and focus group discussions (N = 67) with Singapore adolescents aged 13–17 years old, this study examines (1) whether adolescents access the news and if so, via what technologies, and (2) the factors that influence their news access. Findings show that adolescents prefer to read news online and that older adolescents (aged 15–17 years old) read more than younger adolescents (aged 13–14 years old). Factors shaping access to news include technological (portability, personalization, curation, and notifications), social (families, peers, and schools as sponsors), and personal factors (active seeking of news vs. incidental news exposure). Policymakers, scholars, and educators should consider the physical, social, and curatorial dimensions of news reading to implement policies and design practices to encourage news access and exposure. Educators can foster adolescents' motivation to read news by engaging them with news of interest to them, creating opportunities for them to receive the news through their smartphones and other devices, and developing their civic knowledge base.

This comparative study examines metalinguistic awareness and its relationship with academic language proficiency in Singaporean primary 3 English-Chinese bilingual children (n = 390) and monolingual Chinese-speaking children from mainland China (n = 190).

By investigating three components of metalinguistic awareness (i.e., phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and syntactic awareness), the present study seeks to extend current theoretical understanding of metalinguistic awareness in three directions. Firstly, the bilingual advantage proposed in Bialystok’s Analysis and Control framework is verified by comparing bilingual children who are learning two typologically distant languages (English and Chinese) in Singapore with monolingual Chinese-speaking children. Secondly, the concurrent involvement of different components of metalinguistic awareness in academic language proficiency is investigated in these two groups of children. Thirdly, the cross-linguistic relationship between metalinguistic awareness and academic language proficiency in Singaporean bilingual children is explored in light of Cummins’ Common Underlying Proficiency and Developmental Interdependence Hypotheses, in which he proposes that skills acquired in one language can be utilized in learning another language.

Comparable tasks in English and Chinese were administered to examine the children’s metalinguistic awareness as manifested in phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and syntactic awareness. Correspondingly, comparable tasks were used to measure the children’s academic language proficiency in the following areas: vocabulary, reading fluency, reading comprehension, and composition competence in English and/or Chinese. According to Bialystok’s Analysis and Control framework, bilingual children have more chances to develop higher levels of control of attention due to their access to two language systems, and consequently may outperform their monolingual peers on metalinguistic tasks that place a high demand on control of attention, but not necessarily on those requiring high levels of analysis of linguistic knowledge. However, the present study did not bear out this prediction, as the results support Bialystok’s claim about analysis of linguistic knowledge, but not her claim about control of attention. The bilingual children did not perform better than their monolingual peers on tasks that demanded high levels of analysed knowledge, which may be attributed to the influence of formal schooling and language exposure. For tasks that required high levels of control, no consistent superior performance was found in the bilingual children.

The present study also gives a more complete picture of the relationship between various components of metalinguistic awareness and academic language proficiency. For the Chinese-speaking monolingual children, all three components of Chinese metalinguistic awareness contributed significantly to Chinese vocabulary, among which Chinese morphological awareness and syntactic awareness accounted for much more variance than Chinese phonological awareness. For the other three Chinese academic language proficiency tasks (i.e., Chinese reading fluency, Chinese reading comprehension and Chinese composition competence), Chinese syntactic awareness was found to be the only significant predictor.

Concurring with the trends observed in the monolingual children, results showed that for the Singaporean bilingual children, Chinese phonological awareness contributed a small but significant variance only to Chinese vocabulary. In contrast, the bilingual children’s Chinese morphological awareness and syntactic awareness were good predictors not only for Chinese vocabulary, but also for the other three Chinese academic language proficiency measures. In terms of the within-language relationship between English metalinguistic awareness and English academic language proficiency in the bilingual children, all three components of English metalinguistic awareness concurrently predicted unique amounts of variance in all English academic language proficiency measures, with English morphological awareness and syntactic awareness accounted for the major share of the variance.

Furthermore, the results from SEMs lend strong support to Cummins’ Hypotheses by demonstrating a robust cross-linguistic association of metalinguistic awareness in the bilingual children. Metalinguistic awareness appeared to serve as a common underlying competence that supported academic language proficiency in both English and Chinese. In addition, home language use significantly predicted not only metalinguistic awareness in both languages but also Chinese academic language proficiency.

Taken together, these findings indicate that children’s performance on metalinguistic awareness tasks and the relationship between metalinguistic awareness and academic language proficiency are shaped and mediated by language experience and other factors such as formal instruction, language features, and language learning environment. Educational policies and pedagogical instruction should take these factors into consideration.