New Pedagogies in Teaching and Learning

For many native speaking students of Chinese, composition writing is a challenge. It is especially difficult for students in Singapore learning Chinese as a second language since Chinese is not the medium of instruction in schools and not the main home language of most students. Compared to other language skills, the teaching of writing is not systematic. Teaching of composition seems to be only a by-product of reading class.
Chin, Gong, and Tay (2015) developed an online interactive process-writing module to explore the effectiveness of collaborative process-writing in the Web 2.0 environment in Singapore. Based on constructivism and social-constructivism, this module aims to provide students opportunities for peer assessment and self revision.  The students learned to write online and repeatedly practise peer review through online written interactions. The students become the main body of learning during the learning process. The teachers, by passing on the sovereignty of learning to the students, have transformed into the facilitators and designers.  The findings proved that the module has benefitted the students. However, it does not answer the question as to what might have brought about the positive effects of using the Wiki-based writing procedures. This paper, based on the data of the abovementioned research, tries to find out the relative dominance of various messaging measures contributing to Wiki-based essay writing among students who learn Chinese Language as a second language in Singapore.
Feedback the students gave and received not only enhanced their exposure to the target language but provided more opportunity for critical thinking. ‘To give is better than to receive’; this saying also applies when talking about students’ collaborative learning. Where pedagogical implications are concerned, teachers conducting writing classes not only need to teach specific writing techniques, but more importantly, need to teach students to stand at a higher point to plan and assess writing as well to give them more ownership towards, confidence in and enjoyment from their writing. As the adage goes, give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

“Did the student understand the text? Or was the student unable to express his or her understanding of the text?” This is a common challenge faced by language teachers, especially when teaching students learning the language as a second or foreign language. Conventional reading comprehension activities used widely in Singapore schools tend to rely heavily on students writing their responses to questions assessing their understanding of the text. However, for lower progress learners, these activities can be highly daunting as the task requires both reading comprehension and writing in a single task. As a result, many may lose confidence with learning the language. To address this issue, the Chinese Language unit in Broadrick Secondary School conducted an exploratory study in 2017 on the use of Making Thinking Visible (MTV) routines on two Secondary 2 classes to (1) improve reading comprehension skills; (2) scaffold development of complex sentence construction and (3) improve engagement of students in learning the Chinese Language. The mean differences in achievement scores for SA1 and SA2 for the reading comprehension component, for multiple-choice question (MCQ) items and open-ended items, were compared using paired t-tests. While we did not find significant differences between the MCQ and open-ended items between the reading comprehension sections for SA1 and SA2, we observed that students were more engaged in class and were able to understand texts much better. While the study was a small- scale trial, the teachers have been encouraged by the initial results and would be refining the approach and scaling to other levels in subsequent years.

Qualitative methodologies have been widely used in relevant studies to accommodate the complexity of second and foreign language teaching and learning research. Although several studies have surveyed the usage trends of qualitative methodologies for research in language teaching and learning (e.g., Benson, Chik, Gao, & Wang 2009; Lazaraton 2000), a complete picture that considers the approaches and methods employed in the process has not been fully examined. In addition, few studies have investigated the nature of both the purpose statement and research questions as well as their relationship to approaches and methods in qualitative research. Therefore, in order to pursue rigorous qualitative research, researchers must carefully address the purpose statement and diligently construct research questions. Notably, Creswell (2016) has stressed the importance of both the purpose statement and research questions in qualitative study and has presented the key elements required in a good purpose statement and research question. The present study investigates the nature of and current trends in purpose statements and research questions appearing in qualitative research published in the past decade in three major international language teaching and learning journals. This study comprises two parts: (a) a literature review that summarizes various views and defines both the purpose statement and the research question; and (b) an analysis of purpose statements and sets of research questions in 226 qualitative research articles drawn from the aforementioned journals, including their relationships with the chosen approaches and methods. More concretely, we examine whether either the purpose statement, the research questions, or both are mentioned and explore what elements are contained in each purpose statement and research question. In a previous study, the same 226 qualitative research articles were closely examined in four dimensions: approaches, methods, number of participants, and length of research period (Tojo & Takagi 2017). By considering current approaches and methods as well as the results from Tojo and Takagi’s study (2017), this research will further reveal the nature of qualitative purpose statements and research questions and provide pedagogical implications regarding how to devise a reader-friendly purpose statement and construct an appropriate research question according to the research aim.