OBJETIVOS ESPECÍFICOS

The study adopts a purposeful sampling of teacher participants from one junior and one senior school of a Singapore-based British international school and one primary and one secondary school in Singapore. While there is no data to specifically report the proportion of bilingual (L2) or monolingual (L1) students from each school, the school profiles provided the researcher with ample information about the student population of each school. The students from the schools in the Singapore-based British international school are largely monolingual while the students from the schools in Singapore are largely bilingual. The Singapore primary and secondary schools were selected from a large-scale research project ‘Core 2 Research Programme: Pedagogy and Assessment’, the researcher was involved in while working at a research centre in Singapore. (Refer to Appendix 1 for details on the Core 2 project.) The research programme participating schools are examined for the changes of teachers’ classroom practices in response to the national initiative, TLLM explained earlier. The junior and senior schools of the selected Singapore-based British international school were selected as they fulfill the geographical requirements of the researcher who is based in Singapore. British-based international schools monitored and inspected under UK’s regulatory body, Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) were invited to participate in the study, of which the selected two schools were finally included.

3.2.1 Sampling Strategy for Teachers/Students (Participant Sample)

This study aims to conceptualize a multisemiotic dialogic teaching model of scaffolding strategies, useful for practitioners to adopt when designing reading lessons. This imposed the requirement to capture rich, high-quality classroom talk for

meaning making. Therefore, a purposeful and convenience sample of English Language primary and secondary classroom observation videos were selected to represent data from the Singapore schools and Singapore-based British international schools.

To form the Singapore cases of teacher-student discourse sample, two participating teachers, with classes of between twenty-five to forty primary five (11 years old) and secondary three students (15 years old) were selected. Under the ‘Core 2 Research Programme: Pedagogy and Assessment’ research project, data was collected from 70 schools. (Refer to Appendix 1 for details of the project.) This was in the form of classroom observations of 343 units of Primary 5 and Secondary 3 lessons in 7 subjects: English Language, Math, Science, Social Studies, Chinese Language, Malay Language, and Tamil Language. A total of 46 coders from the research centre, representing various disciplines, were involved in the classroom observations. The schools were chosen using stratified random sampling, taking into account the level of achievement of the school and school type. The sample of classes to be observed reflected the national breakdown of streams. Once a school had been chosen, the subject-stream combination to be observed was determined. Finally, the teachers and classrooms observed for that particular subject-stream combination were randomly chosen. For the purpose of this study, the English-Express stream (high to mixed-average ability) combination was selected, of which 2 teachers/classes focusing in a reading instruction unit of work were randomly selected to represent the Singapore data for this study.

To form the Singapore-based British international school cases of teacher- student discourse sample, two participating teachers, with classes of about twenty- five Year 6 (11 years old) and twenty Year 10 students (15 years old) were selected. When the Singapore-based British international junior and senior schools were selected, the researcher had left it to the Heads of Junior and Senior Schools to work with their Year 6 and Year 10 teachers. The selection of the classes was made in consideration of the teachers’ availability for observation. When the two teachers indicated their availability and consent for the researcher to conduct an observational (video-recorded) study, the only condition shared was for the lessons to be of a reading instruction.

Findings of CA studies suggest that any phenomena described may be quite general, possibly universal or species-specific (Sidnell 2001). However, it is clear that conversation involves the mobilization of the local resources of particular languages social formations, and that conversational practices may be constrained or shaped by culture-specific phenomena (Schegloff 2006). Therefore, the researcher ensured that demographic differences between the teacher and student-participants are acknowledged in this study. The teacher participants consisted of three female teachers and one male teacher, with similar ages (mid 30s) and years of experience (7-12 years). The class sizes between the Singapore schools and British international schools were varied due to the expected norms of each context of school environment. A typical class size for a Singapore school is 38-40 students, while that of a Singapore-based international school is 20-25 students. The level of student participation was found to be similar for each age-level. Further information on the language background of the largely monolingual students from the British international junior and senior schools as well as the largely bilingual students from the Singapore schools is included in Appendix 5. This highlights the fact reiterated earlier in Chapter 1 that the data could not be representative across all teachers and students but provides a proof of concept for a legitimate area of research.

Table 1 Basic Demographic of Teacher and Student-participants

Table 1 above summarises the basic demographic information gathered about the teacher and student participants.

Singapore Primary Singapore Secondary British international school Primary British international school Secondary Teacher-participants

Pseudo names Ms Anna Mrs Sue Mr John Ms Jane

Gender/Age F/32 F/38 M/35 F/33 Years of experience 7 12 10 8 Singapore Primary Singapore Secondary British international school Primary British international school Secondary Student-participants Class size 40 38 25 20

Age 11-year old 15-year old 11-year old 15-year old

Level of Participation

Mid-High Mid-Low Mid-High Mid-Low

English language ability

3.2.2 Sampling Strategy for Lessons/Activities (Event Sample)

Since the study focuses on classroom talk for meaning making in the context of a reading instruction, lessons video-recorded and observed were of those where the teacher participant covered specifically a reading instruction unit of work – this covered reading comprehension at the primary-level and literature/literacy lesson at the secondary-level. More importantly, the genre of text type selected had to be fiction. The number of lessons for the unit of work depended entirely on the teacher’s own designed curriculum. In order to ensure consistency in the context of encouraging talk for meaning making, these lessons were chosen to involve teacher expositions and teacher-students interactional (I-R-E/F) sequences.

The thematic-based extracts of the Singapore schools and Singapore-based British international schools pedagogic discourse were selected respectively from the study’s (i) secondary source of data, a large-scale research project ‘Core 2 Research Programme: Pedagogy and Assessment’, which the researcher was involved in while working at a research centre in Singapore; and (ii) primary source of data, which consists of video-recording lessons from the two identified British-based international schools.

After all lessons were viewed, video recordings of some lessons were selected as they were found to be the most representative of the recurring reading skills and reading comprehension concepts taught in the unit of work. The selected segments were then transcribed; both verbatim and screen captures of the use of appropriate and relevant gestures. Thematic extracts selected represent (1) discourse of meaning- making learning experiences while the teacher is ‘going through’ or discussing the reading passage in class, (2) discourse of meaning-making learning experiences while the teacher is checking students’ responses and understanding of inferences from the reading passage. These extracts demonstrate a rich discourse between the teachers and students, including the use of gestures, as part of providing scaffolding techniques to encourage deeper understanding of the students’ reading. Teacher- fronted activities, rather than group work, were chosen as a context frame for examining teacher questions and gestures. After repeated viewing of the recordings, it was found that teachers use questions and gestures frequently as scaffolding tools when interacting with the entire class. Finally, the selected extracts were kept

consistently similar in length and turn length. This was done by counting the number of turns by the teacher and students in each selected extract. The researcher ensured that the number of turns was kept between 30 and 36 for all extracts. Thus this kept the extracts for each age group relatively similar in length, while the meaningful interactions within the thematic extracts were effectively captured.