Understanding 21st Century Learners

In Singapore, in primary one Tamil reading lessons, students will be introduced to learning the alphabet, writing letters, words containing the letters taught, and sentences containing those words (Harrison, Maurice, 1965; Piasta and Wagner, 2010). Generally, Tamil reading lessons will mostly include the interaction between the student and the teacher. This paper analyses the content of the reading lesson as well as student-teacher talk (Rymes, 2016). It also discusses the role of the teacher as facilitator, the students’ interest in learning, and the pros and cons of the language students speak at home. This analysis is based on the transcriptions of the reading lessons of the Tamil Corpus Data project (DEV 03/15SL). The encouragement, teacher’s beliefs (Maxey, 2013 & Rath, 2011) and the facilitating skills of the teacher enabling the students to ease through the lesson empowering them to acquire the language were the key findings of our research. Data from six Primary Tamil classrooms shows that the students are enjoying the lessons and a facilitation pattern emerges in the classroom.

This paper presentation aims to share the findings and experiences of two schools – Marsiling Secondary School and Unity Secondary School – which conducted an intervention in collaboration with Technologies for Learning Branch, Educational Technology Division, Singapore Ministry of Education in 2018. The project aimed to investigate the effectiveness of leveraging technologies such as online annotation tool, collaborative canvas and multimedia resources in improving students’ ability to write cohesively. The technologies were leveraged in conjunction with a specially designed lesson package that focused on connecting ideas in email writing. This study was implemented with Secondary 3 students age 15 years old. The intervention was designed to address the lack of writing skills in students to connect their ideas in a cohesive manner. This anecdotal evidences were further affirmed by a discourse analysis of the students’ compositions before intervention. Quantitative findings from the discourse analysis showed very few discourse devices that connects ideas between sentences or between paragraphs.
The specially designed lesson package focused on cohesive devices such as ‘additive’, ‘adversative’, ‘causal’ and ‘temporal’. The content was guided by Systemic Functional Linguistic (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) and an adapted cohesion model of Halliday and Hasan (1976), Sanat (2002) and Nik Safiah et.al, (2011) to suit the needs of the Secondary 4 Malay Language students. The lesson package included pedagogical structure that foregrounded scaffolding. After frontal teaching of concepts, a 4-step structure would follow – identify, select, construct, write. The lesson design made learning more fun with ample scaffolding, individual and collaborative learning opportunity.
Impact on pupils was captured through various means such as lesson observations and discourse analysis, showing positive behaviour and the ability to write cohesively and extensively. Students were observed to show high motivation in their learning. They were comfortable in using technologies such as annotation tool for the purpose of identifying, editing and providing insights for individual work and also for collaboration among peers. In addition, they were observed to be enthusiastic, engaged and diligent. They demonstrated their understanding through the various scaffolding activities and email writing tasks.