Coping with Struggling Students in Singapore

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the new examination format. The two teachers are teaching small classes consisting of not more than 15 students per class. Small groups are especially effective for struggling learners (Ganske et al., 2003). Teachers pay more attention to these learners, providing extensive verbal and written feedback on how they can improve their writing.

Skills to teach are decided at departmental level. These skills are documented in the Scheme of Work (SOW), which is a working document in this school. As pointed out by Teacher A, not all the plans in the SOW will be carried out due to disruptions caused by unforeseen events in school. The two teachers are not overly stressed by the need to cover everything stipulated in the SOW. Instead, they focus on the essential skills that they need to teach the struggling students.

To add on, Professional Learning Circles (PLC) are conducted every Tuesday. The purpose is to discuss teaching strategies and to share teaching resources. However, there may not be full attendance because some teachers are straddling between a few levels.

Through these various methods, the department provides assistance to the teachers to help them cope with the struggling readers and writers.

Resource Bank

As mentioned by Teacher A, the textbook All About English is not relevant to the struggling learners:

The content is remote. For weak ones, they find it harder to find the connection.

Thus, the responsibility for coming up with relevant teaching materials for the struggling learners falls on the teachers. Teacher B was part of the team who came up with the teaching materials. She compiled examination papers based on the new format from various schools over the past three years. Hence, the school has a relatively good collection of examination papers which both teachers use in classes often so that students are familiar with the types of questions in 1128 (Ganske et al., 2003). However, since the examination is relatively new, the setters of these papers are still grappling with the demands of the examination. Hence, the questions may not fully reflect the assessment objectives determined by Singapore Examinations and Assessment Board (hereafter SEAB).

To summarise, Teacher A and B rely on the resource bank to teach the various components to these struggling learners because the prescribed textbook is deemed as irrelevant and remote for the learners in XXX Secondary School.

Good teaching practices

Good teaching practices are essential to help the struggling learners. Aware of the low motivation level, the two teachers are mindful of the need to help these learners “attain small successes first”. Teacher A mentions:

A lot of these leaners lack confidence. They need a stimulating and safe environment. Set little tasks that they can achieve. Help them see that they can achieve small success.

To assist the struggling readers and writers, both teachers demonstrate writing and reading skills repeatedly and explicitly. Struggling readers and writers benefit from such demonstrations. Regular practices with other schools’ examination papers is part of the class routine (Ganske et al., 2003). To increase the chance of answering the question correctly, students need explicit assistance in processing most of the questions in 1128 which they regard as challenging. Teacher B reveals that students face problems in answering Paper 1 Section C. Both teachers did not mention how they help them to cope with such questions, except to comment that the students do not “read extensively”. For Paper 2, Teacher B resorts to asking her students to write down the technique to answer different questions types that may appear in Paper 2 in a little notebook so that they can refer to it when in doubt. However the progress is very slow. Teacher B points out that her students are still “answering language type questions in a content way” despite her reminder for the past nine months. She adds:

The style of answering is wrong. They are still not getting it.

In summary, these struggling learners who are usually unmotivated require more than good pedagogical practices. They also require teachers who are able to motivate them.

Discussion

Due to the scope of the research, the researcher is unable to collect data from the entire recommended population. Therefore, the researcher is mindful of the concerns about the reliability and validity of data elicited from the small sample. As 1128 was first conducted in 2013, there is little prior research in this area. Accuracy of the data is validated via members’ checking and triangulation.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how teachers cope with the new GCE O-level examination (1128) with struggling readers and writers. From the interviews, it was discovered that although they use three methods to cope with the new format, they found the new format more challenging for struggling learners as compared to 1127 (Refer to Appendix 5 and 6 for a comparison between Paper 1 and Paper 2 of 1127 and 1128). These findings are discussed in terms of what the researcher knows about struggling learners (Ganske et al., 2003) and the issues that a change in the English syllabus may bring (Goh, Zhang, Ng, & Koh, 2005).

From the teachers’ interview, it is clear that they face several challenges with struggling learners in their daily teaching of the English language. Although motivating these students is not the main focus of this study, their lack of motivation presents real issues in the classroom, which affects their language acquisition. Despite their low proficiency level, these students are still required to sit for the 1128 GCE O-level examination. Teachers have a great urgency to close the gap so that they are ready for the examination in October. Managing the students’ needs, time constraints and the demands of the school is not an easy task for teachers. They need good support from the department and school.

The direction of the department is essential to ensure that teachers could cope with the new examination format with struggling learners. Small instruction groups, weekly PLCs and SOW are a few identified departmental measures.

Another way that helped the two teachers cope with the new format is the pooling of resources. As the prescribed textbook is inadequate and thus not used, the resource bank consisting of a compilation of internal school examination papers, other schools’ examination papers and teaching materials contributed by the various teachers in the level becomes integral.