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14 Monaliza Hernandez Mamac

Research home works are commonly grounded on student-centered learning premise
that students need to be prepared before the class discussions in order to maximise learning.

In a study conducted by Altinyelken (2015), basic education teachers neglected this premise.
Instead, they see this practice as counter-productive in basic education as they are often done
by somebody else:

…they [students] tended to delegate research assignments to their parents or siblings,
and often they used stationery shops, which provided a printout of Google search
results. Consequently, the potential of research assignments was not realised since

students did not even read the printouts; they simply took them to class. The
extent of students’ delegating their responsibility to their parents was so high that
the ‘new’ pedagogy came to be known among many as ‘parent-centred pedagogy’
(Altinyelken, 2015, p. 493)

Tertiary students, on the other hand, may be more independent of their parents. However,
they will not be able to understand research assignments and readings beyond their linguistic
capacity. Therefore, assignments and homework of this nature has to be designed in a way that
they function as “supplement”, not a requirement for learning. It means that if a research work

or academic article reading is to be done, it should be after the topic is discussed – when the
teacher has already developed students’ knowledge foundation. Furthermore, students have to
be taught how to research priorly and how to read academic articles as academic genres are a
highly specialised. To comprehend highly specialised genres, one needs high literacy skills and
highly specialised reading skills. These skills are rarely modelled and developed in any levels
of schooling in Southeast Asia.

Transformation of Horizontal Discourse (every day) into Vertical Discourse (specialised)
According to Bernstein (1999; 2000), there are two forms of knowledge realised through
discourse – horizontal and vertical. Bernstein (2000) defines horizontal discourse as “local,
context-dependent, every day, and common sense” (p. 159). He refers to it as the ‘common
sense knowledge’ (Bernstein, 1999, p. 159). He states that:

Common because all, potentially or actually, have access to it, common because
it applies to all, and common because it has a common history in the sense of
arising out of common problems of living and dying. This form has a group of
well-known features: it is likely to be oral, local, context dependent and specific, tacit,

multi-layered, and contradictory across but not within contexts
(Bernstein, 1999, p. 159)

Learners develop horizontal knowledge through immediate experience of sensuous
environment. An example, is a child learning the word น้้ำ (n̂̂ ả) or water through their parents