Teaching literacy in English language in Singaporean preschools: exploring teachers' beliefs about what works best

Singaporean preschool teachers are responsible for preparing their young students for a formal education that is predominantly conducted in English. What these teachers believe about how young children learn English literacy skills is important to study, especially when much of the research is situated in very different contexts. Talking to teachers about their roles is a way of examining interpretations of 'effective' teaching and learning in terms of actual literacy pedagogy. Three broad categories were discernible in this exploratory study of interviews with eight teachers, clustering around their concepts of the child as learner, their construction of themselves as active facilitators of children's learning, and the impact of parental pressures on their decision making.