The authors examined the complexity of the simple view of reading, focusing on morphological decoding fluency in fourth-grade readers of English in Singapore. The participants were three groups of students who all learned to become bilingual and biliterate in the English language (EL) and their respective ethnic language in school but differed in…

Show-and-Tell is one of many activities recommended for encouraging children's oral language production in classrooms across the world, but there is little research on the topic. From existing studies, teacher facilitation is posited as key to shaping children's oral language production. This paper explores teacher strategies for facilitating…

This paper reports on a promising methodology for multilingualism studies that was trialled at the National Institute of Education (NIE) on the campus of Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, in 2018. The methodology named the Aural-Oral Transect (AOT) is a systematic, easy-to-implement, unbiased way of collecting quantitative data on…

This study examines four elements of learner motivation, attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction, in an EFL speaking course that uses the computer mediated communication (CMC) tool Google Hangouts. The study found that a preparatory concept mapping task before the CMC sessions improved students' perceived attention, relevance,…

This article is a personal view of the application of results from three areas of research that I believe are relevant to developing second language speaking in the classroom: task repetition, pre-task planning and communication strategies. I will discuss these three areas in terms of level of research application--where research is not applied…

In a bilingual society like Singapore, home language environment (HLE) of Singaporean children is becoming increasingly concerned, especially for those who are yet to have formal education in schools. The reported rapid shift of family language has increased the tensions among families, schools and communities. This study examined some of the many…

The present study examined the influence of Singapore Colloquial English (SCE) on Standard English word spelling through a plural formation task of four words ("man", "tooth", "dress" and "child") among 168 Singaporean bilingual children with Chinese background. It was found that "dropping the…

For more than 30 years drama has been promoted as a valuable teaching tool for language learning. Recent research results have reinforced this position. However, these and other earlier studies reveal that the overall success of the work is dependent, at least in part, upon the artistry of the teacher and the quality of the pretext materials used…

This article describes the phonological awareness and English writing skills among a sample of 297 Singaporean kindergarten children, stratified by ethnicity (Chinese, Malay, and Indian), and examines the relationship between oral language and writing skills in this multilingual population. Overall, Singaporean kindergartners, nearly all of whom…

The oral examination is an important component of the high-stakes "O" Level examination in Singapore taken by 16-17 year olds whose first language may or may not be English. In spite of this, there has been sparse research into the examination. This paper reports findings of an exploratory study which attempted to determine whether there…

This paper is about the questioning patterns of teachers in an early intervention reading program and the exceptions to this typical interactional pattern. Literacy experts recommend a rich diet of oral language for young learners of English literacy. Teachers offer this rich diet by creating an appropriate learning environment in the classroom…

This small scale study investigated upper primary teachers' perceptions of the PSLE English oral assessment. It sought to find out the challenges that teachers faced in conducting PSLE English oral assessment and if the assessment format provides a good gauge of pupils' oral competence. Semi-structured interviews were the main research instruments…

To examine the relationship between phonological awareness (PA) and English word-level reading among a multilingual sample, a random sample of 297 Singaporean kindergartners, stratified by ethnicity (169 Chinese, 65 Malay, and 63 Indian), were tested on their PA, receptive vocabulary, and word-level reading skills. Singaporean kindergartners are…

English language teachers' opinions on the pedagogic relevance of spoken grammar are beginning to be reported, yet the voices of teachers in East Asia are rarely heard. In this article, the views of teachers from China and Singapore expressed in an online discussion are compared. The discussion, which was part of a taught postgraduate course,…

In the Singlish-"Good" English debate, the use of Singlish (SCE) is viewed as an obstacle to the development of students' literacy skills in standard English (SSE) and so the practice of classroom codeswitching between the two varieties is strongly discouraged. Yet the presence of the vernacular in the classroom continues to be robust.…