312 Singaporean children aged 4, 7, and 10 years from four different home language backgrounds--English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil--were tested for their recognition of animals and non-animals. The Malay-speaking group of children was the notable group that showed a different developmental pattern from the other three groups. They performed…

Singapore is an ethnically, linguistically, and culturally diverse nation-state that has always practiced deliberate language policy and planning. The bilingual education policy, introduced shortly after the young nation's independence has led to the emergence of English-knowing bilinguals who are proficient in both English and their ethnically…

Long-term school absences during pandemic lockdowns may result in learning gains and losses much like the summer reading loss, but little is known about the actual effects of such lockdowns. This mixed-methods study examined changes in reading enjoyment, amount and resources in three groups of bilingual children--English-Chinese, English-Malay,…

Show-and-Tell is one of many activities recommended for encouraging children's oral language production in classrooms across the world, but there is little research on the topic. From existing studies, teacher facilitation is posited as key to shaping children's oral language production. This paper explores teacher strategies for facilitating…

Although Singapore, a linguistically and ethnically diverse city-state, uses four official languages, namely Malay, Mandarin, Tamil, and English, which are supposed to enjoy equal status, there appears to be a pecking order to these languages. English seems to be the dominant language when taking into consideration the bilingual education policy,…

The current study investigates the impact of the teachers' societal dominant language use within a weak version of translanguaging in early heritage language education. We explored five preschool teachers' use of English, the dominant majority language, in Tamil heritage language classes in Singapore and examined its impact on 33 children's…

Child characteristics, family factors, and preschool factors are all found to affect the rate of bilingual children's vocabulary development in heritage language (HL). However, what remains unknown is the relative importance of these three sets of factors in HL vocabulary growth. The current study explored the complex issue with 457 Singaporean…

The current study examines the relationship between bilingual children's dual language experience (i.e. language input, language output and vocabulary proficiency), and their social-emotional and behavioral skills. Data were analysed from 805 Singaporean bilingual preschoolers (ages 4; 1-5; 8 years), who are learning English and either Mandarin (n…

The aim of this study is to discuss the development of education during the British Colonial rule in Malaya. The scope of this study is focussed on four school systems under British colonialists, namely the Malay Vernacular School, Chinese Vernacular School, Tamil Vernacular School, and English Schools and its implications to the society and…

Though the two languages most frequently used in the homes of Chinese Singaporeans are English and Mandarin Chinese, there is not much information on how the home language can influence language use and attitudes toward these two languages. This study investigates the family language ecology in bilingual homes and aims to compare attitudes toward…

This paper reports on a promising methodology for multilingualism studies that was trialled at the National Institute of Education (NIE) on the campus of Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, in 2018. The methodology named the Aural-Oral Transect (AOT) is a systematic, easy-to-implement, unbiased way of collecting quantitative data on…

What are the challenges faced by a research team in implementing translanguaging pedagogy in a multilingual classroom? What implications does this research project have for researchers in other geographies and other languages? This paper answers these questions on the basis of 7 English reading classes and interviews of teachers and students…

This case study examines how three science teachers in a secondary school attended to the language demands of science through oral interactions in classes of multilingual students with diverse English proficiencies. It specifically unpacks the intricate role of language in science education, where teachers must address disciplinary-specific…

Increasing societal and linguistic diversity poses significant challenges to formative categories of language policies. We make this point via an examination of Singapore's management of its most linguistically diverse ethnic group, the Indians. While heterogeneity has always been Singapore's defining feature, the nature and scale of recent…

Prior research suggesting that longer bilingual experience benefits inhibitory control and monitoring has been criticized for a lack of control over confounding variables. We addressed this issue by using a propensity-score matching procedure that enabled us to match early and late bilinguals on 18 confounding variables--for example, demographic…