Jones, Sally Ann

Pictures, as well as written discourse, convey meanings. However, the capacity of visuals as meaning making resource is often overlooked such that visuals in picture books are not given significant attention. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore visual and discourse interaction, specifically in children’s picture books by Anthony Browne. Visual literacy was adopted for visual analysis while critical literacy was adopted for discourse analysis. The findings indicated that the visuals in Anthony Browne’s children’s picture books convey meanings that can either support or contradict its accompanying discourse.

This paper focusses on the process of learning mathematics in primary school from the perspectives of 62 girls aged seven to eleven. For many of these Singaporean girls, English is not the dominant home language, but they all learn mathematics in English. Despite the fact that achievement in mathematics is high nationally, girls appear to be less confident than boys. Adopting notions of identity and agency at the intersection of language and gender, the paper explores how the girls oriented themselves and others to the figured world of school mathematics as successful or not through their interaction in focus group interviews. While some were confident in their mastery of the subject, for some others, the discipline, its language, and other artefacts, such as model drawing and assessment, restricted and frustrated them. Girls experienced a sense of security in their own fellowship and appreciated considerate pedagogies, such as space for individual agency and for improvisation and expression of language, through which they could achieve understanding and progress.

This article is a review of research in English language education (ELE) in multilingual Singapore from 2010 to 2020. Most research activity has been in the areas of reading and writing while the least has been in speaking and listening and learning spaces. Some findings show how students may be distanced from learning and how complex thinking is constrained in classrooms. Others show the productive nature of metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness and linguistic transfer, suggesting pedagogic approaches of assessment for learning (AfL), scaffolding, and translanguaging to personalize teaching. Factors which influence teacher and student adoption of technologies are revealed by research in e-pedagogies and multiliteracies. Fresh avenues of study have been identity and spatial research which have produced knowledge about agency, diversity, and relations between schools, homes, and communities. Additionally, teacher knowledge and beliefs about texts, metalanguage of the subject, and theories of linguistic and conceptual development evidently require extending. Overall, this decade of research prompts a conceptual opening-up of ELE in Singapore for the next decade in recognition of participant agency and knowledge construction over the networked variety of spaces of ELE.

By providing descriptive evidence from an ethnographic study at three Singaporean primary schools, this paper reveals how participants in children’s education perceive and account for the relations they shape between home and school. Through analyses of interview data from teachers, parents, and children, the article demonstrates the potential effects of the actions of parents and teachers on the structure of the childhoods of a particular group of nine-year-olds. Findings are that children’s lives are mostly centred on their schools, which provide academic and values education. Parents, too, ascribe importance to holistic education; this, their aspirations for the future, and their attention to the individual needs of their children motivated them to agentively support their children’s education at home by teaching and organising educational, sporting, and cultural activities. Therefore, home/school relations structured rather curricularized childhoods for most children in the study.

The example cases were analyzed using assessment for learning (AfL) strategies: a running record of one child’s reading was examined while the other child’s writing was assessed applying frameworks of writing and spelling development on a writing analysis chart. The analyses suggest the influence of each child’s dominant home language and the colloquial variety of English on their learning to read and write the English of school. The study also implies a misalignment between the children’s language and that expected by the materials and tasks used; due to this, the inbuilt scaffolding of the materials did not appear to provide the children with language support. The paper argues that this kind of detailed scrutiny of individual language use, through the application of AfL techniques and contrastive linguistics, provides rich, diagnostic information about the literacy development of individual children and has yet broader implications for pedagogy. The analyses suggest that the deployment of guided pedagogies in teaching young children would enable the effective use of diagnostic information from AfL procedures and the application of contextually appropriate cross-linguistic instructional strategies.