Dr Goh Hock Huan, Liu Yongbing

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Abstract

Despite the vast variety of research done in Chinese language education in Singapore, empirical classroom studies in this area is scarce (Liu et. al，2007). This paper anchors its theoretical basis on Bernstein (1996)'s concept of 'recognition' and 'realization'. It employs the categorization of 'phase' from the 'Singapore Pedagogy Coding Scheme" (Luke, et al. 2004) to illustrate how a teacher conceptualize and realizes her objectives in three classroom lessons for an entire unit of lesson content. Via analyzing the lesson time spent on the different classroom activities, discourse descriptions of each activities type and comparison of forefront classroom activities and activity guidelines in the Teachers' Guidebook, this paper showed that the studied teacher has 'recognized' the lesson content in a way different from the focus outlined by the curriculum planners in the provided Teachers' Guidebook. Instead of highlighting the analytical skills prescribed in the guidebook, she focuses on the dwelling of the lesson topic for her students to prepare them for the final task of composition writing. This paper to some extent showed that teachers has their own cognition and judgment on the lesson content, and the way teachers recognized these contents will in turn affect his/her realization of classroom activities which may be different from the original intention of curriculum planners.

Keyword(s) : Singapore; Chinese Language Classroom; Classroom Activities; Bernstein; Recognition and Realization