Recontextualising reading, rethinking teaching

Jones, S. A. (2012). Recontextualising reading, rethinking teaching: Reading in the English medium primary school in Singapore. Education 3-13, 40(3), 243-258.

Background

The author observed that the teaching of reading in Singapore schools was not implemented in the subject areas (such as Mathematics or Science) students studied but was mainly the responsibility of the English teacher. As a result, she concluded that children might lack the opportunity to think deeply about the various text genres of the different disciplines they read and to apply the reading strategies and schemas relevant to these disciplines.

Aims

The writer analysed school textbooks of various subjects to demonstrate the complexity of the reading tasks undertaken by pupils. She also implemented a school reading project with a dual aim: one concerned the assessment of teaching reading in English, and the other was an exploratory observation study to determine the preferred reading pedagogy adopted by teachers.

Sample

The author, teachers and pupils in nine classes of a Primary 3 cohort in a Singapore primary school were participants of the study.

Method

Each of the nine classes was observed once. Teacher interviews were also conducted. Both the lesson observations and teacher interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. The audio recordings of some lessons were analysed in more detail using interaction analysis. A total of nine texts from Primary 3 textbooks in English, Mathematics and Science were also analysed.

Findings

Results indicated that pupils needed to draw on different knowledge schemas in order to comprehend what they had read for the three subjects. In the English texts, a response was required; the Maths text required solving, and the Science text required observation. They were also required to be familiar with the genre and structure of the different text types to help them identify how the texts were organised and understand the interrelationships between the various components of the texts. Apart from the difficulty in the subject content pupils experienced when they progressed from Primary 2 to Primary 3, the main challenge was found to be in the subject specific reading required for various subjects.

Implications

The writer argued that reading should be taught in all subjects that children studied. She proposed identifying, categorising and introducing various comprehension frameworks for teaching reading to teachers so that the objectives of teaching comprehension of content and of explicit reading instruction could be achieved.

Original article retrieved from Taylor & Francis