Telling cases of bilingual children’s reading and writing for English-medium school: Implications for pedagogy

Abstract

This article presents telling case studies of two young children’s language use in Singapore. The example cases were analysed using assessment for learning (AfL) strategies: a running record of one child’s reading was examined while the other child’s writing was assessed applying frameworks of writing and spelling development on a writing analysis chart. The analyses suggest the influence of each child’s dominant home language and the colloquial variety of English on their learning to read and write the English of school. The study also implies a misalignment between the children’s language and that expected by the materials and tasks used; due to this, the inbuilt scaffolding of the materials did not appear to provide the children with language support. The paper argues that this kind of detailed scrutiny of individual language use, through the application of AfL techniques and contrastive linguistics, provides rich, diagnostic information about the literacy development of individual children and has yet broader implications for pedagogy. The analyses suggest that the deployment of guided pedagogies in teaching young children would enable the effective use of diagnostic information from AfL procedures and the application of contextually appropriate cross-linguistic instructional strategies.