Abstract
Singapore Colloquial English (SCE) is still ubiquitous in Singapore classrooms in that many teachers regard it as a means to facilitate students' acquisition of Standard English (Rubdy 2007). The present study investigated one aspect of SCE, teachers' verb use, in Singapore classroom discourse by using the Singapore Corpus of Research in Education (SCoRE) (Hong, 2005), which covers the annotated data of 100 Singapore classroom lessons concerning four curriculum disciplines (English, Mathematics, Social Studies and Science). The study involved such salient features as unconjugated verb use and omission of copula verbs and auxiliary verbs. Statistical analysis was adopted to identify the patterns of informal verb use, to classify the cases, and to investigate their distributive properties. This study will help raise teachers' awareness of their classroom interaction patterns and re-assess the impact these patterns have on classroom teaching.
Location
Room 2908
Recommended Citation
Niu, Guiling; Doyle, Paul Grahame; and Hong, Huaqing, "Effectiveness of Non-Standard Variety of Language in Classroom Teaching" (2009). SoTL Commons Conference. 49.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/sotlcommons/SoTL/2009/49
Effectiveness of Non-Standard Variety of Language in Classroom Teaching
Room 2908
Singapore Colloquial English (SCE) is still ubiquitous in Singapore classrooms in that many teachers regard it as a means to facilitate students' acquisition of Standard English (Rubdy 2007). The present study investigated one aspect of SCE, teachers' verb use, in Singapore classroom discourse by using the Singapore Corpus of Research in Education (SCoRE) (Hong, 2005), which covers the annotated data of 100 Singapore classroom lessons concerning four curriculum disciplines (English, Mathematics, Social Studies and Science). The study involved such salient features as unconjugated verb use and omission of copula verbs and auxiliary verbs. Statistical analysis was adopted to identify the patterns of informal verb use, to classify the cases, and to investigate their distributive properties. This study will help raise teachers' awareness of their classroom interaction patterns and re-assess the impact these patterns have on classroom teaching.
