Loh, Chin Ee

Leisure reading is associated with many advantages such as improving language skills and academic achievement, developing emotional intelligence and supporting social mobility. Children’s dispositions to read are shaped by instrumental and social factors, and the home reading environment is an important factor that encourages the development of leisure reading habits. This study examines how parental cultural capital, in the form of parents’ educational qualifications,identification as readers and ability to provide their children with resources (e.g., books, comfortable reading environments, devices and subscriptions for reading) support children’s development of positive reading habits.

This paper examines scholarship and empirical work on the use of multicultural literature in the English Language Arts classroom in the U.S. in the context of globalization. Studies in the U.S. tend to focus on diversity within the nation to the neglect of diversity beyond the States. Beyond multicultural perspectives as it is framed in the U.S. context, a global/local perspective that recognizes diversity within and beyond the nation is a more relevant construct for examining the literature curriculum in this globalized postmodernity.

The Building a Reading Culture Study: A Nationwide Study of Reading and School Libraries (BRC) study was conducted with the twin goals of contributing to reading and school library research. This publication provides a preliminary analysis of the kinds of design patterns that have emerged from the data collected from the study and from various study trips made to government, independent and international school libraries in Singapore, Australia, the United States and the Netherlands between 2016 to 2019.

To date, several computerized diagnostic systems have been developed. These systems are limited in their feedback delivery and assessment scopes as well as in the delivery of remedial programs. For example, the Diagnostic English Language Needs Assessment (DELNA) developed by the University of Auckland and the Diagnostic English Language Assessment (DELA) designed by the University of Melbourne function primarily like placement tests where feedback is delivered to the learners but the tests aim to place students in different language learning programs (of course, one could argue that this is the treatment that follows the diagnosis, albeit not highly differentiated at the individual level.). Similarly, the Diagnostic English Language Tracking Assessment (DELTA) designed by Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the Diagnostic Language Assessment (DIALANG) produced by Lancaster University provide feedback to learners but without specifying skill mastery profiles, differentiated remedial programs, or actionable plans (Harding, Alderson, & Brunfaut, 2015). These systems are also limited by their inability to provide fine-grained information on learners’ growth over time.

In this study, we seek to understand how the presence of a trained or professional librarian (PL)1 contributes to the learning within Singapore school libraries by examining principals, library coordinators and teachers' perspectives of their school libraries.
The research questions for the study are: 1. What are the perspectives of school leaders and teachers about their school library?
2. What differences are there in perspectives between the perspectives of school leaders and teachers in schools with trained librarians and without trained librarians?

The need to bring culturally relevant material into English Literature classrooms has long been considered important from academic and intellectual as well as societal and personal perspectives. More recently, scholarship and educational policies are encouraging the use of "multicultural" texts that reflect the polyphony of voices in the world as being culturally relevant, and having the potential to engage students in fertile discussion about their identity and the world around them.
This paper takes a close look at scholarship, research, policy and practice in the U.S. and Singapore in the last 20 years, and gives insights into how practice is being contextualized in both countries. While certain terminology seem to be the same, close examination of the data show that there are notable differences in scholarship, policy, and practice in both countries. Particularly important to this discussion is the notion of what counts as "multicultural" and how that has impacted upon curriculum choice and instruction.