Png Lay Hoon, Jessie

The purpose of this project was to follow-up on a prior project1 which investigated the use of Questioning-the-Author (QtA) (e.g. Beck & McKeown, 2002; Beck, McKeown, Sandora, Kucan, & Worthy, 1996) with negotiation for meaning (NfM) (e.g. Pica, 1994) in Singapore Primary 4 (P4) reading lessons (OER 29/08 RS). A 2-year collaborative project was undertaken to assist teachers in understanding and using QtA and negotiated discussions. The intervention also intended to lead to sustainable, school-based teacher development through introducing different ‘generations’ of teachers to join the project year-by-year and by encouraging the first generation (Gen 1) of teachers to act as mentors and leaders to the second generation (Gen 2).
Research Questions 1. How do teachers understand reading comprehension in the local, P42 school setting (i.e. what do teachers understand reading comprehension to be and how do they understand the development of student reading comprehension)? 2. In what ways do teacher understandings of reading comprehension change through participation in a long-term (3 year) professional development project? Specifically, in what ways do teacher understandings change at different points of time (1 year, 2 years, 3 years) and when engaged in different roles (trainee, trainer, observer, evaluator)? 3. How successful are the different stages of the intervention (Direct Instruction, Reflection & Adaptation, Lesson Study) in changing teacher classroom practices for reading comprehension?

Many researchers in the West have come up with different teaching instruments to teach reading comprehension. Reciprocal Questioning (ReQuest) is one of them. According to Manzo (1969), ReQuest was designed to help students generate their own questions, encourage inquiring attitude and develop independent comprehension skills. This study aims to find out whether students would be able to generate higher order thinking questions and if so, will ReQuest lesson work well in Singapore English curriculum. 21 high and middle progress Primary five students from a local school were taught and observed. The findings point out that more than half of the students were able to generate higher order questions and produce acceptable answers. As observed through the discussions, students negotiated meaning and picked out salient information presented in the reading text. They also exhibit desire to search deeper into text through clarification, re-reading before coming to a consensus the type of questions they wanted to generate. They asked speculative questions such as how and why which opened up the floor for further discussions. This implies that ReQuest is a good tool to be used in Singaporean reading comprehension lessons. It gives students opportunity to go deeper in their response to the text. The process of re-reading allows students to pick up salient information from the text. It also offers students to be active participants in the comprehension process, encourages critical literacy and enhances questioning techniques which they could use it to practise self-questioning for other academic readings.

This book consists of chapters written by teacher educators from universities which are members of the Association of Southeast Asian Teacher Education Network. These universities are one of the best, if not the best, in teacher education in their respective countries in Southeast Asia. The authors earnestly discuss education reform; early childhood education; professional development of teachers; teacher education transformation; and theory-practice nexus in pre-service teacher training, in their respective countries. Many suggestions and ideas are put forth by the authors, and these can be adapted in other teacher education institutions in the region and beyond. Teacher educators, researchers, policy makers, teachers as well as anyone interested in what Southeast Asia universities are doing in terms of education and teacher education, should find this book enlightening.

This study explores the use of the Functional Approach in assessing the writing of Upper Secondary School students in Singapore. It is felt that the current system of assessing Upper Secondary students' writing is flawed primarily because it does not focus on the specific structural and linguistic requirements demanded by the various genres of writing, such as the narrative and argumentative genres. This study therefore sets out to test the effectiveness of an alternative approach to assessing students' writing using the Functional Approach (Macken and Slade, 1993) which focuses on particular genres of writing. The specific genre that this study focuses on is the narrative.

Assessing narrative writing through Functional Approach involves analysing students' work based on the purpose of the narrative, which is basically to entertain. This purpose is expressed through the structure (genre) and language features (register) of the narrative. Based on this concept, this study uses a set of criteria adapted from Macken and Slade (1993) and Derewianka (1994, 1996) for evaluating students' narrative texts. Eight students from a Secondary Four Express Stream in a neighbourhood school were selected for the study. The students were asked to write four pieces of compositions in total. After writing each piece, the students were to refer to the criteria given to them and the researcher's annotations to make the necessary changes to their drafts and to improve on them.

Through a close analysis of the structural and linguistic features of the four texts written by the students and the subsequent interviews conducted with the individual students, this study shows that assessing students' writing using the Functional Approach seems to have helped the students not only to be more aware of the distinctive text structure of narratives, but also to develop its various stages more substantially. They could also use the register appropriate to narratives.

This study should be of value for all English Language teachers in Singapore, especially as they embark on the new genre-based English Syllabus set by the Ministry of Education, which essentially grew out of the Functional Approach.

A small-scale study of reading comprehension in Primary 4 was undertaken. One aspect of the study was to introduce “Questioning-the-Author” (QtA) technique (Beck & McKeown, 2002) as part of reading comprehension lessons. Subsequently students answered comprehension questions which included ‘traditional’ reading comprehension questions (literal, inferential and applicative, following Ruddell, 1999) and QtA-type question (e.g. “What do you think the author wants you to understand?”). In addition to checking student comprehension via the lesson worksheets, we also administered a survey to gather information on student perceptions of item difficulty and interest level. In other words, which types of questions were perceived to be more difficult? Which questions were considered to be more interesting? This paper focuses on student perceptions of the different question types. We will also consider whether students’ perceptions of difficulty/interest matched accuracy of student responses.

The study follows up on prior research on the key role of negotiation for meaning (NFM) in increasing second language learning and oral comprehension (e.g., Ellis & Heimbach, 1997) and on reading comprehension (Van den Branden, 2000). The investigation described in this report considers whether and in what ways classroom discussions can encourage the types of interactions that are beneficial to language and literacy learning, especially reading comprehension. The intervention encourages a more thoughtful, questioning approach to reading comprehension, integrated with oral interaction that encourages NFM.

"Preparing teachers for the 21st century era entails cognizance of the changing nature of knowledge, learning and environments. New models of knowledge building and knowledge co-creation are emerging. Personalised learning takes on new dimensions with mobile devices and new tools for sharing and meta-thinking. In teacher development, evidences from research point to the importance of teacher reflection on practice, collaborative sharing and feedback through peer and expert mentoring."