An Exploration of the Explicit Technological Self-assessed New Media Oral Skill Learning Model for the Teaching and Learning of Mother Tongue in Singapore
Submitted by:
Guat Poh Aw
Abstract:
With today’s rapid technology advancement, literacy has taken a different stance as opposed to the past. To ensure that our students are fully literate in the today’s world, educators ought to prepare our students to be proficient in these new literacies. Being a small city with human capital as her core resource, developing human capital is key to stay competitive in the global economy. With this, it is pertinent to go beyond educating students with basic literacy skills, but to equip them to operate effectively in the new literacies. One recent move to future-proof our students is the move towards the use of technological media for mother-tongue language(MTL) oral assessment. Since 2014, video was used in replacement of the traditional two-dimensional graphic pictures, as a stimulus for oral examination.
Given the ethnically heterogeneous and linguistically hybrid social background, the language policy aims at cultivating bilingual proficiency in its citizens with both English language(EL) and MTL. Over the years, statistics had shown that the EL has emerged as the dominant home language in most homes. As such, MTL learning is construed as a language in-between the first language and second language, that is 1.5 per se.
As the use of media approach to engage in an oral communication requires a higher level of engagement in the cognitive skills such as memorizing and capturing of the core information through visual image and audio narrative; rapid and concurrent information processing in the MTL and speech articulation, this becomes especially challenging for 1.5 language learners. With the output language not being the dominant language, information processing needs to undergo an additional process of language code switching. Pilot study(Aw,2016) had shown that many students encounter difficulties both cognitively and language articulation during the new media oral assessment.
Hinging on these observations, an Explicit Technological Self-assessed New Media Oral Skill(ET-SOS) Learning Model(LM) was proposed to counter the challenges. Capitalising on feed-forward self-assessment and ICT learning approach, we believe that this LM will cultivate students’ cognitive and language skill, as well as, self-regulated learning competency.
Currently, two secondary schools with four classes were involved in the study to prove this concept. The research questions are as follows:
1. What are the challenges faced by teachers and students with the teaching and learning(T&L) of new media for MTL oral assessment?
2. What are the perspectives of teachers and students with T&L in the new media for MTL oral assessment?
3. How can the proposed ET-SOS LM address these challenges?
Findings showed that majority of the students cohort encountered difficulties during the oral presentation. Speech paralysis occurs when the students were performing cognitive translation. It was also cognitively challenging for students to organize their thought-flow logically and coherently to attain articulacy. Teachers too faced challenges in competency building in this new media assessment approach. Though aware of the T&L gap, the issue is yet to be addressed with a school-wide approach. Preliminary research observations had also suggested that the ET-SOS LM is effective in addressing the above issue.
Keywords : New Media Oral Skill, Explicit Technological Self-assessed Learning, Singapore Mother Tongue Teaching and Learning
References
Aw,G.P. (2016, December). The Teaching and Learning of Viewing Language: Use of Video as Stimulus in Assessing Oral skills in Mother Tongue Languages. Paper presented at The First International Conference on Chinese Language Education, Hong Kong, Hong Kong (China).
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