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This study investigated the types of reading comprehension questions that better discriminate between students of high and weak Chinese reading comprehension abilities in junior elementary grades. A total of 127 Primary 1 and Primary 3 students took part in this study. As the placement test was long, it was group into three smaller tests (L1, L2, and L3) for students with high, medium, and low reading comprehension abilities. Placement test scores were correlated with their Chinese language exam scores to find out if the placement test could accurately differentiate students with different reading comprehension abilities. Performance on each question was also analyzed to find out if they were good discriminators. Results indicate that placement test scores correlated significantly with school exam scores. Hence, there is evidence to support the claim that the placement test could discriminate between students with varying reading comprehension abilities. Moreover, question difficulty indices and question discrimination indices showed that questions that require high level of discourse processing ability were good discriminators for older, higher-ability students. Index Terms-Chinese reading comprehension, placement test, discourse processing, learning of mother tongue.

This paper details results from a three-year study investigating how to help students in Singapore write vivid compositions in Mandarin, the Chinese 'mother tongue'. Mastery of the mother tongue by Singaporean students has become an important government priority in recent years. The strategies employed by this study included the use of information and communications technology (ICT) mediated scaffolds such as collaborative mind maps and online peer editing to help students learn micro-writing strategies. This paper outlines the process of using various scaffolds to support students to learn and apply the action chain micro-writing strategy. A class of 31 Primary 4 from a neighbourhood school participated in this study. Findings indicated that students were very enthusiastic about writing in the ICT-mediated environment. Contrary to the teacher's initial belief, students could be scaffolded to write action chains quickly. Findings highlighted the potential of scaffolding students in learning small chunks of writing strategy in an ICT-mediated environment that enabled them to practice these strategies in their composition writing until they could master and apply them. These micro-writing strategies gradually built up to a complex set of skills, including expressive writing. Moreover, students enjoyed working in groups and editing their peers' work online. This showed that peers could be engaged as scaffolders in the classroom to free up the teacher' time, allowing the teacher more time to spend with students who were not performing well.

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