Course Descriptors |
MED900 Educational Inquiry (4 AUs)
This course introduces participants to the fundamental processes involved in conducting research such as formulating research questions, writing a review of the literature by synthesizing empirical studies, understanding various methodological approaches, collecting and interpreting research data. Participants in this course will have opportunities to develop the skills, knowledge and strategies needed to read, interpret, and evaluate the quality of research reports. In addition, participants will gain a critical understanding of quantitative, qualitative, and combined research approaches. |
MED901 Academic Writing for Postgraduate Students (4 AUs)
This course will guide postgraduate students in studying the discourse and linguistic conventions of academic writing in their own discipline so that they can better manage the writing of their thesis/research paper. In addition to studying the discourse practices of academic writing, students will also examine the thinking processes underlying the production of those practices. |
MED902 Integrative Project (2 AUs)
This capstone course requires participants to identify an education issue which forms the focus of inquiry, locate and read the most relevant literature to generate suggested potential solution to address the problem. The solution should show evidence that they are able to take the available information and restructure it in an appropriate way to deal with the issue. |
MEL901 Language and Literature Education (4 AUs)
Historically, literature and language have not been dichotomous terms. Literature as a concept emerged in the fourteenth century and its latin root is littera denoting a letter of the alphabet. In this sense literature was tied to literacy or, more specifically, the ability to read. It was only later that literature became connected to the concept of taste involving the ability to read particular kinds of text and the discipline emerged in distinction from fields of language and linguistics. In this course, we seek to examine historically the disciplinary schism between English language and English literature and explore socio-cultural, linguistic and textual theories advocating an integrated approach to English language teaching. In the process, we aim to problematize the dichotomies between reading and writing, literacy and literariness, the functional and the aesthetic. |
MEL902 Analyzing Literature and Language (4 AUs)
This course introduces participants to the study and analysis of styles in canonical and non-canonical literary texts, as well as other similarly creative texts such as advertisements, using fundamental linguistic and literary tools. It is an interdisciplinary course spanning the borders of English language and English literature, which are presently framed in the school curriculum as two subjects even though they are mutually constitutive fields of inquiry. As education expands globally and exponentially, it is imperative that both language teachers and literature teachers promote learners who are able to systematically identify and critically evaluate or appreciate the qualities of language used for particular effects in a plethora of creative texts which exist around them. Participants in this course will have opportunities to examine and describe the forms of texts, interpret their communicative functions and offer evaluations of the textual effects created, supported by language-based evidence. |
MEL911 English as an International Language (4 AUs)
This course explores the global spread of English and introduces students to the key sociolinguistic issues in the study of English as an international language (EIL). In particular, it helps students understand the socio‐cultural contexts that have given rise to such a spread and provides them with insights into the linguistic characteristics of the diverse varieties of English spoken and adopted by multilingual communities of people across the globe. Concepts commonly problematized in the EIL research literature such as the notion of a native speaker, the relationship between language, culture and identity, standards and norms of English, and code‐switching will be key themes in the course, especially where these are relevant to English language education and policy. |
MEL912 Language Teacher Education and Professional Development (4 AUs)
This course aims to provide an introduction to current approaches to language teacher education. It is aimed at prospective and current language teacher educators who are interested in developing their skills and knowledge in teacher development. The discussions will include ways of helping pre-service and in-service teachers to develop their theories of language teaching, strategies for critical self-awareness, classroom observation and supervision techniques, as well as develop strategies for managing and evaluating English Language programmes. |
MEL913 Materials Design in the Language Curriculum (4 AUs)
The course will deal with principles and techniques in the evaluation, adaptation and development of English language teaching-learning materials for school-age learners. It will prepare students to understand the principles of materials design and think about the place of materials in course planning and teachers role in evaluating and adapting published materials, and selecting and designing supplementary materials. Systematic procedures for materials evaluation will be introduced and students will source, analyse and consider how to exploit supplementary materials that fulfill curricular objectives. Finally, since it is essential that teachers know how to design materials, students will be guided to develop their own materials for the teaching of language systems and skills, and for the promotion of higher-order thinking skills. Concepts such as differentiation, interdisciplinarity and learner involvement in materials selection and creation will be discussed. |
MEL914 Teaching Oral Communication: Current Theories and Approaches (4 AUs)
The aim of the course is to introduce contemporary theoretical notions and pedagogical frameworks and approaches related to teaching listening and speaking such as the metacognitive, cognitive and social processes involved in oral communication, the principles and procedures for evaluating listening and oral competence, and the incorporation of multimodal and literary texts. You will explore how to apply the ideas covered and discussed in this course in your own teaching context, which are also relevant to, and can be adapted for, the teaching of other languages in both first and second language contexts. |
MEL915 Language Assessment in the Classroom and Beyond (4 AUs)
This module aims to teach theories and applications of language assessment in classrooms and beyond. Students will be introduced to: (1) fundamental concepts, principles, and issues in language assessment; (2) approaches to and procedures for designing and constructing language tests, and (3) fundamental concepts in quantitative data analysis with specific focus on classroom applications. The module presents language assessment and data analysis in a pragmatic and easy-to-understand way and addresses some of the perpetuating misconceptions concerning language assessment. |
MEL916 Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy (4 AUs)
This course examines theories of language acquisition (first, second, and bilingual) from psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. A range of factors that affect the nature and route of language acquisition will be considered (e.g., age, cross-linguistic influence, linguistic environments, cognition, identity, power, etc.). A solid understanding of the nature of language acquisition is expected to provide good grounds for designing language teaching pedagogy. |
MEL917 Teaching Grammar and Writing (4 AUs)
This course introduces participants to contemporary approaches to teaching writing and contextualised functional models for teaching grammar. Participants will also develop principles and procedures for evaluating current practices in the teaching of grammar and writing. |
MEL918 Reading in a Multimodal Age (4 AUs)
This course aims to introduce participants to various theories in the teaching of reading from early to adolescent literacy. Students will explore skills-based instruction and constructivist approaches, cognitive and sociocultural theories of reading, and discuss the implications of these ways of thinking for their classroom teaching and assessment. Furthermore, students will explore what it means to read in a multimodal age, and examine the reading and viewing of visual and other multimodal texts. |
MEL919 Popular Culture (4 AUs)
In this course students will be required to interrogate how the contemporary is informed by the dilution of distinctions between high and mass culture, and how popular texts are highly political signifiers of the cultural conditions in which they are formulated. It will focus on topics such as narrative, genre, representation, globalization, new media and advertising, branding and celebrity culture. |
MEL920 Creative Writing in the Classroom (4 AUs)
Creative writing, whether in fiction or non-fiction, is part and parcel of the English language curriculum in Singapore and around the world. The course will engage teachers of English language and literature in the very processes of creative writing that they would have their own students engage in. Practical experience in, along with theoretical and research knowledge of, the craft of writing, can help teachers reflect critically on their own pedagogical approaches in the composition classroom. |
MEL921 Literature, Culture and Education (4 AUs)
This course attends to the theory and practice of English education in relation to literary studies, raising questions that resist simple answers: How are the aims and objectives of English studies bound up with the processes and practices of a given culture? How are English Literature curricula and pedagogy implicated in the ideological structures of formal schooling? To what extent should traditional notions of literature education change amid the realities of globalization in the digital age? How do English curricula valorize and/or marginalize students and teachers cultural identities on the basis of language, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality? Are English teachers complicit in privileging the cultural paradigms of a western literary education? How can literature education become a vehicle of cultural and political critique? These questions will be addressed in relation to the challenges of critically performing and conforming to the Literature Education curricula in Singapore schools. |
MEL922 Teaching Shakespeare (4 AUs)
This is a graduate course on acquiring knowledge and understanding of as well as how to teach the works attributed to the poet and dramatist William Shakespeare and a number of his contemporaries. Students will be introduced to a representative but also canon challenging range of Shakespeare texts complemented by a range of scholarly and pedagogical texts with the goals of making teachers more informed, better readers and teachers of Shakespeare texts. Each week each Shakespeare text will be taught through the lens of a particular literary theory. Upon completion of this course, students should be able to choose appropriate texts to teach their students, as well as choosing and planning appropriate strategies for introducing local students of any level to Shakespeare. Teaching involves teacher guided but active student lead seminars, each week by a different student, culminating in a symposium concerning new ideas for teaching Shakespeare in new and inspiring ways in the local context. Students will have a range of opportunities to think critically, share and debate ideas, and pedagogical strategies, through class discussion, group work, pair work and online activities. |
MEL923 Literary Theory and Teaching (4 AUs)
Central to this course are questions of power and identity in relation to the aims and outcomes of education. How are different critical approaches to literary criticism implicated in the ethics and politics of schooling? What ideological orientations underpin different modern and postmodern approaches to literary criticism? What kinds of subjectivities are privileged and/or marginalized in each of these approaches? How might critical engagements with the theory and practice of literature education inform and even reform teachers pedagogical practices in the classroom? To what extent might an understanding of critical theory call for a redefinition of the desired outcomes of literature education in Singapore? |
MEL924 World Literatures (4 AUs)
This course examines the emergence of world literature as a concept and fi eld in the new millennium. What does it mean to read and teach world literature in an age of high-speed global interconnections, transborder crossings, intercultural encounters and fears about a planetary environmental crisis? Topics for discussion include questions of world-making and worlding; the international book market; postcolonialism and diaspora; nations and borders; memory and history; the dominance of global English; the importance of translation and circulation; and the Anthropocene. Throughout the course, students will engage with selected poems, short stories, novels and essays from Southeast Asia, South Asia, East Asia, the Middle East and beyond. The class will also engage closely with specifi c theoretical writings, including work by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mario Siskind, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Minae Mizumura, among others, to develop various conceptual approaches to interpreting world literature(s). From the pedagogical angle, students will also compare world literary with nation-centric approaches in teaching literature, focusing in particular on the notion of a cosmopolitan approach to education. |
MEL925 Literature and Film (4 AUs)
This course seeks to examine the interface between film and literature. Multimodality is a daily reality for our students and is becoming increasingly more prevalent. The present curriculum does not prepare our students sufficiently on how to study and analyse multimodal texts. Visual and Media Literacies are also key aspects of 21st Century Skills and Literacies. Although Viewing and Representing have been included in the English Language syllabus, there is little emphasis on these two skills in terms of pedagogy and assessment. Film is the most popular medium today and the closest visual representation of literary works. The course is structured to develop from pictures to graphic novels to film. The movies selected have a literary slant including adaptations or the use of literary texts. Students will work in collaborative groups as well as complete individual assignments. |
MEL926 Young Adult Literature in the English Classroom (4 AUs)
Towards the late twentieth century, the boundaries of the Literature curriculum have increasingly expanded and challenged the dominance of the Western Canon. The democratization of Literature education has meant that it is no longer possible to organize the curriculum around a narrow range of literary texts without considering new, emergent concepts and genres encapsulated by terms such as postmodern, multicultural, transnational, and cosmopolitan. The focus of this course is on Young Adult (YA) Literature and ways of reading and teaching such texts in the English Language and Literature classroom. |
MEL927 Aims and Approaches to Designing Literature Curriculum and Assessment (4 AUs)
This course explores traditional and contemporary philosophies that guide curriculum and assessment approaches in the Literature classroom. We will explore the principles behind curriculum and assessment practices that contribute to learning in the literature classroom. Topics that will be covered include inquiry-based learning, discussion-based learning, text choice, portfolio assessment, writing in the literature classroom, and formative learning. |
MEL928 Children's Literature for the English Classroom (4 AUs)
This course offers an exploration into the world of children's literature from different theoretical perspectives. It situates children's literature as sites where issues of class, race, gender, ethnicity, nationality and identity are constructed. Through applications of literary theory, the course offers opportunities to engage critically with tests in relation to readers and contexts. The course will also introduce scholarship from critical discourse and cultural studies revealing children's stories as not only a means of enculturation but also as a platform to develop the critical and creative imagination. |
MEL929 Teaching Singapore Literature (4 AUs)
Schools in Singapore are increasingly encouraged to introduce Singapore literature into the curriculum. This course aims to introduce participants to a range of Singapore literary texts and the teaching of such texts in a way that would be both appealing and useful for teachers pursuing the Master of Education (English) programme. The course will cover almost a century of Singapore literature, looking at the genres of drama, poetry, novels and essays. While the course will be largely chronological, emphasis will be put upon texts deemed of especial worth, content- and linguistically-rich, and potentially fascinating for primary, secondary, and junior college students to encounter and experience in their respective classrooms. It is hoped that such a course will inspire and encourage teachers to introduce a wider and more nuanced range of Singapore texts to their students, and to become more aware of the nature and forms of literature created within Singapore as well as the socio-historical contexts (c. 1930-2020) out of which each text emerged. |
MEL930 Language Assessment and Technology in the Classroom (4 AUs)
The primary purpose of this course is to offer students who have an interest in language assessment the opportunity to gain practical knowledge and skills, with a particular focus on the use of technology in the fi eld. As part of the course, students will develop an understanding of how emerging technologies, such as artifi cial intelligence (AI), are being increasingly employed in language assessment. Upon completion of the course, students will be equipped to apply their knowledge of language assessment and technology to real-world situations. This course is designed for students who possess a genuine interest in language assessment and are committed to investing the necessary time and effort to engage with the course material. The course delves into theoretical discussions and hands-on activities, allowing students to develop their skills in using technology in language assessment. Ideal candidates for this course are those eager to explore the practical applications of technology in language assessment, including the utilization of AI. As new technologies continue to play an ever-growing role in language assessment, understanding the underlying technology and its applications will prove invaluable for future careers or studies in this area. By the end of the course, students will have acquired practical skills and knowledge that can be readily applied to their future work in the fi eld of language assessment. |
