While the last two decades have witnessed a growing body of research on the quality of student writing, research on the impact of the socio-cognitive approach on young learners' writing has remained scarce. To fill this gap, this study investigates the effects of the socio-cognitive approach on the writing quality of 98 fourth graders in…

Teaching in Singapore, Tze Kwang Teo cannot conceive of a history teacher unfamiliar with the mnemonic "PEE" (or "PEEL") used to structure students' essays. Its ubiquity is testimony to its power, reminding students both to explain and to substantiate their claims. Yet, as Foster and Gadd have argued, its neat formulation can…

This article reports on a questionnaire-based investigation of writing strategies used by Singapore primary school pupils. A sample of 1,618 pupils from two local primary schools participated in the study. A number of one-way ANOVA analyses were run to measure the relationship between the participants' use of writing strategies and their English…

I believe that there should be a focus on problematic language issues such as prepositions in the language classroom in order to provide continuous exposure to such features. Consequently I provided my students with supplementary activities on prepositions, and also promoted learner autonomy by highlighting urls which deal with collocation.…

This paper details results from a three-year study investigating how to help students in Singapore write vivid compositions in Mandarin, the Chinese "mother tongue". Mastery of the mother tongue by Singaporean students has become an important government priority in recent years. The strategies employed by this study included the use of…

This article examines performance in written English and Chinese in a sample of Singapore students (n=43). The implications of the findings for the Singapore classroom are discussed. (Contains 24 references.) (JL)