Dr Connie Lum, Dr Jennifer Tsai & Ms Wendy Toh

Abstract

A conducive environment is critical to early language development. Since Singapore became independent in 1965, English has been chosen as the nation's working language, that is, the common language of the administration and main language of instruction in schools (except mother tongue lessons), while the other official languages – Mandarin, Malay and T amil, are the mother tongues for the various ethnic groups. At that time, Chinese dialects (such as H okkien, Teochew and Cantonese) were the home languages of the local Chinese community. These were gradually replaced by Mandarin by 2000.

1. However, this linguistic landscape is not the same anymore. T here is a sustained trend of increasing use of English as the dominant language at home, based on the yearly data from parents of incoming Primary 1 (P1) students over the past twenty years
   
   
2. The government's move to promote the use of English for economic development and the use of English as the instructional language, with the exception of mother tongues, in schools in 1987, had resulted in the dominance of English over the years. Among ethnic Chinese students, the proportion of students using English as the dominant home language rose from 28% in 1991 to 59% in 2010. As more and more Singaporean preschoolers come from predominantly English-speaking families, there is a need for preschool Chinese language (CL) teachers to understand and adopt second language teaching approaches, so as to better support these learners' Chinese language acquisition and development. At present, majority of Singapore preschool CL teachers tend to adopt the traditional teacher-centred approach in their classrooms and teach CL as a first language. As a result, preschoolers who speak Mandarin as a second language are particularly at risk of failing to use the language and they tend to be passive learners in their CL classes. Therefore, a new curriculum is developed for this group of early second language learners. This language-focused curriculum aims to cultivate their interest in learning CL and develop their linguistic, literacy and cognitive abilities through various types of literature, including picture storybooks, fairy tales, fables, folklores and poetry. Learners are engaged as active participants in the process of exploration and knowledge construction as they learn to use the Chinese language in real-life settings. In implementing this curriculum, CL teachers are required to adopt a teaching practice that is in line with second language instruction and focus on developing the students' oral language. In particular, the use of scaffolding as a teaching strategy is critical for learners who are in the early stages of language acquisition. In order to assess whether the newly developed curriculum is properly implemented in the pilot school, the curriculum developers have conducted regular classroom observations to monitor the teachers' lesson delivery. During classroom observations, teachers' lesson delivery is monitored to see if they have achieved the following objectives:
   • Quality interactions (teacher-student interaction, comprehensible input, language modelling, feedback),
   • Role as a facilitator (able to purposefully challenge, scaffold and extend students skills)
   • Positive Affect
   • Encourage and facilitate functional use of the language

We will be using classroom observations of a series of lessons based on the Chinese version of Sandra Horning's picture storybook – The Giant Hug to illustrate how scaffolding can be used to provide tailored assistance to preschoolers and support their oral development in the target language.