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Friday, August 8, 2008

English, as it is taught


From TODAY, Voices
Friday August 8, 2008

21ST Century Pedagogy

MOE’s Infocomm master plan should extend to the teaching of the language

Picture: English language instruction needs to keep up with the times, says a reader. TODAY File Pho to

Letter from Heng Kai Le

I REFER to “High tech at the heart of teaching”
(Aug 6).

I am heartened at the Ministry of Education’s (MOE) timely initiative to unveil its Third Masterplan for information and communications technology (ICT).

Unfortunately, younger Singaporeans may not be so adept at authoring their own knowledge. While some lack the skills to utilise search engines judiciously — beyond Wikipedia — to obtain information, others find it difficult to articulate their ideas as they do not know the finer points of using Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. Hence, there exists a dichotomy between their interest in media literacy and IT tools and their competencies — a gap thoughtfully plugged by MOE’s Third Masterplan.

Another point is that while the implementation of ICT has been coupled with syllabus changes to assess the proficiency of students in making sense of knowledge, these forward-looking changes do not extend themselves to our national examinations in the English language. Even science subjects now require students to make connections between theoretical concepts and real-world applications through dataresponse questions.

However, for the English language, students are still expected to pen situational writing essays and dissect comprehension passages. These do not seem to be authentic learning experiences, given how today’s text has evolved to be a multimodal combination of words, sounds, images and animation.

English language teachers have already turned to blogging, podcasting and vodcasting in order to improve their students’ proficiency in the language.

It would be a pity if the MOE stuck to conventional methods of how English is taught and assessed, arguably one of the key factors to securing our widely-lauded competitive workforce.

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