Abstract
There has been a trend over recent years for Singapore to act as a magnet for sojourns from international policymakers and politicians. These sojourns attempt to learn from classroom practices as a result of Singapore’s high educational performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) ranking. The focus of these visits from the perspective of the United Kingdom (UK) is on attainment in prestigious subjects such as Maths and Science and not on Singapore’s enlightened quadrilingual language policy. Therefore, the focus in this section on the details of classroom discourse and analysis of practice provides a welcome insight behind the facade of an educational ‘success’ story. At the same time, concerns about high-stakes testing, rote learning, learners’ lack of creativity and independent thinking have seen the East looking to the West for guidance on educational practices (Zhao, G. (2013). Rebuilding the Chinese soul: Some considerations for education. Frontiers of Education in China, 8(4), 498–517). The four chapters in this section address pedagogical practices in primary classrooms. The authors employ a variety of research methodologies and cover the themes of children’s engagement in reading, teaching morphological awareness, similarities and differences in teaching languages and the transmission of Chinese culture in Chinese language lessons.
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Hancock, A. (2016). Commentary on ‘Practices’. In: Elaine Silver, R., Bokhorst-Heng, W. (eds) Quadrilingual Education in Singapore. Education Innovation Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-967-7_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-967-7_13
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