Background: Accumulating evidence shows that the home literacy environment (HLE) has a potent and early influence on children's language and literacy development. However, there is a more limited understanding of HLE and its contribution to children's outcomes for simultaneous bilingual children exposed to two languages at home, particularly in…

This article presents the results of a small-scale study on the linguistic landscape in the two terminals of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Thirty-one digital photos of non-identical signs out of a total of 368 'top-down' signs identified in the public space were collected, and questionnaires were administered to airport users to gauge…

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…

Phonological awareness is critical for early reading acquisition across alphabetic as well as non-alphabetic languages. The grain size of phonological awareness varies with oral language structure and written orthography across languages. Phonological awareness' grain size and contribution to reading for simultaneous biliterate children is…

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…

Reading and writing skills are intricately associated, and their mutual influence is seen as a dynamic process during literacy development for English. However, a broader understanding of the cross-domain development of literacy would be gained by examining literacy acquisition across different languages and scripts. An advantageous approach is to…

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,…

For teaching and learning Malay language grammar, there are many types of online assessment tools and applications have been developed in Malaysia. One such application is Quizizz, a game-based online quiz that facilitates teaching and learning. The purpose of this research is to measure the effectiveness of Quizizz application to teach and learn…

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,…

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…

Linguistic landscapes have proven to be intriguing foci of sociolinguistic research in and of themselves, given language in public spaces indexes broader sociolinguistic processes, struggles, and policies. This paper, however, trials linguistic landscape as a methodological tool for research that solicits and analyses metalinguistic talk --…

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…