Abstract
This paper details results from a three-year study investigating how to help students in Singapore write vivid compositions in Mandarin, the Chinese ‘mother tongue’. Mastery of the mother tongue by Singaporean students has become an important government priority in recent years. The strategies employed by this study included the use of information and communications technologies (ICT) mediated scaffolds such as collaborative mind maps and online peer editing to help students learn micro-writing strategies. This paper outlines the process of using various scaffolds to support students to learn and apply the action chain micro-writing strategy. A class of 31 Primary 4 from a neighbourhood school participated in this study. Findings indicated that students were very enthusiastic about writing in the ICT-mediated environment. Contrary to the teacher’s initial belief, students could be scaffolded to write action chains quickly. Findings highlighted the potential of scaffolding students in learning small chunks of writing strategy in an ICT-mediated environment that enabled them to practice these strategies in their composition writing until they could master and apply them. These micro-writing strategies gradually built up to a complex set of skills, including expressive writing. Moreover, students enjoyed working in groups and editing their peers’ work online. This showed that peers could be engaged as scaffolders in the classroom to free up the teacher’ time, allowing the teacher more time to spend with students who were not performing well.
Highlights
This paper begins with an overview of the Singaporean ‘mother tongue’ environment and how it influences the motivation to learn one’s ‘mother tongue’ in neighbourhood schools
This paper focuses on the latter effort, where the study of one writing skill, that of the “action chain”, was conducted as part of normal curriculum based teaching in a primary 4 class in a neighbourhood school
We address the one-size fit all blanket help provided in class by creating small chunks of writing strategies that students could learn in a short period of time and which could be applied in a wide variety of contexts
Summary
This paper begins with an overview of the Singaporean ‘mother tongue’ environment and how it influences the motivation to learn one’s ‘mother tongue’ in neighbourhood schools. The pilot phase of the study and its findings that reflect real world issues in the teaching of Chinese composition writing in these schools are described. It continues to introduce a writing program that aims at scaffolding students to write vivid compositions in Chinese. Both research issues in instructional scaffolding and real world classroom issues are considered in the design of the writing program. The paper further describes how the writing model was introduced in school and the data collected for analysis. Findings of implementing the writing program in a school are discussed. Future refinements of the writing program are included
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