The paper presentation aims to share research findings and experiences of five schools who conducted a research project in collaboration with Technologies for Learning Branch, Educational Technology Division (ETD), Ministry of Education, Singapore. The project aims to investigate the effectiveness of using the annotation tools in the 10’M portal in improving students’ ability to write cohesively. This study complements the 2015 Malay Language Syllabus that requires students to be able to write cohesively at upper primary level.
10’M Portal is a portal developed and managed by ETD to support experimentations in the teaching and learning of the Malay Language with the use of ICT. The annotation tools available in the 10’M portal allow students to highlight and add comments or suggestions without modifying the original text itself. The tools can be thought of as a layer on top of the existing text and this annotation layer is usually visible to other users who share the same portal, therefore supporting collaborative learning amongst students. The tools allow students to identify cohesive devices used in a text, comment and suggest suitable cohesive devices, and also exchange ideas during online collaborative activities.
The study involves five schools with P4 classes. It includes pre- and post-tests, control and experimental groups, and discourse analysis of the students’ compositions. Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) is the backbone of this research. The project adapts the cohesion model of Halliday and Hasan (1976), and Sanat (2002) to suit the needs of P4 Malay Language (ML) students. The cohesive devices that this research focuses on are ‘additive’, ‘adversative’, ‘causal’ and ‘temporal’. Teachers conduct a one hour lesson twice weekly for a period of 5 consecutive weeks from Term 3 Week 2 until Term 3 Week 6. However, unlike the control group, the experimental groups leverage the annotation tools functions available in the 10’M Portal. Besides conducting discourse analysis of the cohesive devices in the students’ compositions (pre-test, post-test), feedback from teachers and students are collected for triangulation.
