[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 13 | July 25, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

This study examined whether the self-reported use of English outside school by Mandarin-speaking and Tamil-speaking ESL learners played a role in the accuracy of the oral use of the simple past tense. The participants were primarily in their thirties and were mostly students in an ESL class of a lower intermediate or intermediate level of proficiency. This study used an interview questions task which was designed to elicit the oral use of the simple past tense. The results indicate that there is an interaction between L1 and the use of English outside an ESL school environment. The Tamil-speaking ESL participants who reported using English outside their ESL school were more accurate than those Mandarin-speaking ESL participants who also reported such use of English. For those learners who reported no use of English beyond the classroom, there was no difference in accuracy between the two L1 groups. However, the fact that the data on English use outside the class was self-reported throws some doubt upon the reliability of the data.

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[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 13 | July 25, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

The National Institute of Education (NIE) is the provider of teacher education in Singapore and is an institution within the Nanyang Technological University; NIE is simultaneously accountable to the Ministry of Education in Singapore. A Communication Skills for Teachers course (CST) was introduced for all pre-service teachers at NIE in July 2005. A catalyst for the development of this course, which focuses on speaking and writing skills, was the perception that the standard of English of Singaporean teachers had declined. Since 2010, the course has been offered as a blended course and increasingly, several aspects of course administration have also been conducted online. The two main areas of assessment for the course are an oral presentation and a written test.

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