Interactional patterns in Singapore's English classrooms

This paper analyzes pedagogic practice in primary and secondary Singaporean English classrooms in terms of dialogicity. The dominant interactional patterns in Singaporean English classrooms are initiation–response–evaluation (IRE), whole class lecture and individual seatwork in which the students give either one word answers or remain silent. Classes are teacher fronted and monologic. This pedagogy does not lead to extended oral narratives and critical thinking on the part of the students thus leading to a tension between the demands of the English Language syllabus and the way English is taught in the classroom. The paper goes on to demonstrate how the traditional IRE can be manipulated to create a more dialogic classroom given the fact that pedagogy is fairly entrenched. Data for these claims come from Panels 3 and 4 of the CORE project conducted by the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice in Singapore. Specifically data come from quantitative coding of 273 primary and secondary English lessons from over 50 schools and qualitative coding of their transcripts.