Bio
Steve Paquin is an English instructor at the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Centre for English Language Communication (CELC), and a doctoral student with NUS’s Bilingualism and Language Processing Lab.
He has been teaching children to read English since 2015. He specializes in teaching bilingual, English-learning children, but he also has extensive experience working with monolingual English speakers. Using a synthetic phonics approach, Steve Paquin has successfully taught nearly 200 children between the ages of 3 and 7 to read English.
He holds two Cambridge English teaching qualifications, the CELTA (2017) and DELTA (2020). For his DELTA Module 3 Specialization, he designed an intensive beginning English reading curriculum for Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking children. He holds a Masters in Applied Linguistics (2024) from the University of Massachusetts Boston. His Masters Thesis is a corpus linguistics analysis of the spelling-to-sound patterns (graphemic-phonemic correspondences) in a 7 million word corpus of English children’s literature. In August 2024, he started his Doctoral studies in English Language and Linguistics at the National University of Singapore, where he is studying how bilinguals use sound and spelling to read English.
Steve Paquin has helped children learn to read English in several countries. In Las Vegas, Nevada, he taught at two private elementary/primary schools, Challenger School and The Adelson School. He has taught Kindergarten, First Grade, Third Grade, Fourth Grade, and served as a Lower School Educational Specialist.
While teaching Kindergarten at Challenger School, his 2018-2019 class was split 50/50 between monolingual English-speakers and bilingual English-learners. The class scored in the 98th percentile on the national Iowa Assessment.
In the 2022-2023 academic year at The Adelson School, he collaborated with his Third Grade colleagues in designing a phonics/spelling intervention program that targeted specific spelling gaps in approximately 55 Third Graders. At year’s end, the students’ improved spelling accuracy by 10% (see below).
Steven has also taught English as a second- or foreign-language for International House and Quantum College in Vancouver, BC; Teaching House in Koreatown, Los Angeles; Apollo English in Hanoi, Vietnam; and most recently CELC in Singapore.
Teaching children to read English is a matter of social justice.
I teach preschoolers and kindergarteners to read English using phonics. With a knowledge of phonics, children become independent readers and students.
