Reading strategy instruction is positively related to students' reading literacy. However, little is known about how reading instruction that emphasizes different types of reading strategies affects reading literacy. This study examined how Singapore primary school teachers' reading strategy instruction affected Grade Four students' reading…

This paper applies the theories of linguistic distance and translanguaging to analyse the pedagogy of teaching vocabulary and grammar in English to Malay-English bilinguals who are struggling to read in English. More specifically the paper explores how the teacher tried to create cross-linguistic transfer and how the students display…

This paper is about implementing a translanguaging approach to teach reading skills in English with simultaneous bilinguals who speak substantial amounts of Malay and Chinese at home. This new pedagogical approach was tried out with 2nd graders in 3 schools in Singapore: instead of the typical immersion approach to teaching reading skills in…

Using translanguaging as a theoretical foundation, this paper analyses findings from a Grade 2 reading class for low achieving students, where Malay was used as a scaffold to teach English. Data come from one class in one school in Singapore and its Learning Support Programme (LSP), which is part of a larger research project on biliteracy. The LSP…

This report summarises Year 6 pupils' attainment in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) survey of 2016 in Northern Ireland and explores the context of that attainment. PIRLS is an international comparison study of reading at ages 9-10. PIRLS has a five-yearly cycle. Northern Ireland took part in PIRLS for the second time…

This summary accompanies the national report for Northern Ireland (Sizmur et al., 2017). It outlines the attainment of Year 6 pupils in Northern Ireland in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2016 survey and explores the context of that attainment. PIRLS is a study of reading at ages 9-10 and has a five-yearly cycle.…

Children with hyperlexia display spontaneous superior word decoding ability before the age of five but impaired listening and reading comprehension. They have direct phonological processing of any given text with apparent ease and often well beyond their vocabulary usage. Though they can recognise and read words, words appear meaningless. As a…

In this article theoretical frameworks of genre theory, reading strategies and situated learning are used to show the complexity of the reading task for pupils in the English medium upper primary school in Singapore. An analysis of text genres from school textbooks of English, maths and science at primary three, shows how reading appropriately in…

In this article, I report on a small project involving the use of guided reading groups, levelled texts and running records in a multilingual primary school in Singapore. I focus on running records and ask whether their use is suitable pedagogically and practically for the Singaporean context. The analysis of 22 records of primary one and primary…

This article presents the findings of an observation study of reading lessons in English at Primary Three in Singapore. The aims of the study were first to establish whether a common pedagogy to teach reading in English exists at this transition year of children's schooling, and second what the cultural effects of this pedagogy might be for…

Buddy Reading, a peer tutoring programme, is popularly adopted in Singapore schools to increase the reading proficiency of lower primary children who are not reading at age appropriate levels. However, this programme is rarely subjected to systematic evaluation. In view of this, the present study undertakes an evaluation of the programme as it is…