Style, Identity and Literacy: English in Singapore (Critical Language and Literary Studies, Band 13) - Softcover

Stroud, Christopher; Wee, Lionel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847695957 ISBN 13: 9781847695956

Verlag: Multilingual Matters, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Style, Identity and Literacy: English in Singapore is a qualitative study of the literacy practices of a group of Singaporean adolescents, relating their patterns of interaction - both inside and outside the classroom - to the different levels of social organization in Singaporean society (home, peer group and school). Combining field data gathered through a series of detailed interviews with available classroom observations, the study focuses on six adolescents from different ethnic and social backgrounds as they negotiate the learning of English against the backdrop of multilingual Singapore. This book provides social explanations for the difficulties and challenges these adolescents face by drawing on current developments in sociolinguistics, literacy studies, English language teaching and language policy.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Christopher Stroud is a Senior Professor at the University of the Western Cape and Professor of Bilingual Research at Stockholm University. He has researched and written widely on multilingualism, language planning and policy and language education in contexts as diverse as Papua New Guinea, South East Asia, Scandinavia and Southern Africa. He is currently working on elaborating the idea of linguistic citizenship.

Lionel Wee is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English Language & Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Language Without Rights (Oxford University Press, 2011), and is currently working on a book about organizational styling.

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Style, Identity, and Literacy

English in Singapore

By Christopher Stroud, Lionel Wee

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2012 Christopher Stroud and Lionel Wee
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84769-595-6

Contents

Preface, 
1 Social Practices and Linguistic Markets, 
2 Multilingualism in Late-Modern Singapore: A Portrait, 
3 Multilingualism in Late Modernity: Literacy as a Reflexive Performance of Identity, 
4 Some Data About Our Data, 
5 Fandi and Ping: Literacy Practices and the Performance of Identities on Ambivalent Markets, 
6 Edwin, Wen and Yan: Styling Literacy Practices Inside and Outside the Classroom, 
7 Sha: A Comparison, 
8 Pedagogy, Literacy and Identity, 
9 The Dynamics of Language Distribution in Late-Modern Multilingual Singapore, 
References, 
Subject Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Social Practices and Linguistic Markets

(1)

Yan: You have to know [English] otherwise people will laugh at you.

...

I: What happens if the shop assistant is a Malay?

Y: Then I will speak in Malay

I: Will you attempt English first?

Y: No. They will say I am like this spoiled girl. I mean, like, they will know, they can sense that I know they are Malay. Then if, like, I am speaking English, then it is like I am boasting my .. you know.

I: Really?

Y: I know some people think that way.

The above is an extract taken from an interview with Yan. Yan is a Malay female, about 16 years old, who is growing up and studying in Singapore. In the extract, Yan points out that knowledge of English is crucial in Singapore (otherwise people will laugh at you). As the inter-ethnic lingua franca and prestige variety in Singapore (and, of course, in many other societies as well), English serves an important gatekeeping function by allowing selective access to social and economic goods, thus influencing in important ways the social trajectories of those who may (or may not) be considered to speak the language well. This gatekeeping function creates a strong motivation for Yan to improve her English. Yet, one of the problems that she faces comes from the kind of identity she projects if she insists on using English instead of Malay, which is the official mother tongue of her ethnic group. In interactions with her co-ethnics, insistence on using English is associated with snobbery (They will say I am like this spoiled girl; it is like I am boasting). Because of this, Yan feels that she has no choice but to use Malay when interacting with a Malay shop assistant. In this way, Yan is responding to what she sees as pressure from a particular social group to privilege ethnic identity even in the context of a commercial transaction (I know some people think that way).

Young adolescent Singaporeans, of course, do not deny that there are people and institutions (such as their parents, their teachers, their potential future employers) that deeply value academic qualifications. But it is also the case that for many of these adolescents, the activities involved in acquiring such credentials may sometimes conflict with the activities required to maintain or gain localized peer recognition. In some cases, any formal recognition by school authorities may even mean a loss of popularity or credibility amongst one's peers. And if the two forms of recognition happen to be in conflict, it may sometimes be peer credibility that gets to be prioritized over official recognition by the school.

Yan is therefore most certainly not alone in the kinds of predicaments that she faces and in this book, we focus on a number of other Singaporean adolescents who have to deal with similar dilemmas as well. Our goal here is threefold. First, we are interested in how the micro-interactional identity work performed by our adolescent informants contributes to a macro-sociolinguistic paradox. The paradox is this. Despite the espousal of a multilingual language policy on the part of the state – a policy that recognizes four official languages (English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil) – Singapore society appears to be moving largely toward a situation that favors the reproduction of English language hegemony. How the collective experiences of adolescents such as Yan can lead unequivocally toward the privileging of English – despite the fact that there exists social pressure to continue using other languages like Malay – can contribute to a broader understanding of the kinds of constraints and pressures that multilingual societies have to cope with, especially in the context of globalization and late-modernity. The main answer to our first question is presented in the following chapter, where the indexical values of different languages in the Singapore landscape are discussed. Here, we see that despite the Singapore government's attempts at arguing for the equal value of English and the official mother tongue, its own policy formulations seem to clearly favor the former over the latter. And these signals of language valuations are picked up by adolescents such as Yan, who then face the challenge of reconciling an official commitment to the equal value of English and the official mother tongue, on the one hand, with a social reality where English seems to be particularly privileged, on the other.

This need to reconcile conflicting linguistic demands leads to our second goal. That is, we also wish to understand how attempts at learning English in Singapore may implicate particular kinds of identities among adolescents, thus possibly creating for them conflicts of various sorts, both inside and outside the classroom. We will see, in Chapters 5 through 7, that there are times when these adolescents resolve conflicting identity demands by favoring their desire to preserve peer-oriented relationships, even though they are aware that this might undermine the very activities that they themselves believe could help them improve their English. But in order to even begin making sense of the data presented in these three chapters, some preliminary remarks about the relevant analytical concepts and the methodology involved in our data collection are pertinent. These preliminary issues are addressed in Chapters 3 and 4.

And third, we are aware that it is not enough to merely note the language-learning problems faced by these adolescents. Because of this, we also wish to explore some of the ways in which identity concerns can be beneficially harnessed by educational institutions so as to develop teaching strategies that can help them acquire a more standard variety of English. In other words, the challenge is to find ways of getting these adolescents to learn standard English while not simultaneously requiring them to compromise on the kinds of identities that they are already heavily invested in (Norton, 1995). We do this in Chapter 8.

As we tackle these three questions, it will become clear that there are broader issues at stake that are being implicated as well. One of these is how assumptions about the nature of language and literacy affect language education policy. For example, it becomes difficult to ignore the fact that much of language education policy is predicated on the unquestioned assumption that language is an ontologically stable and delimitable phenomenon. This kind of assumption tends to encourage a view of language and literacy skills as decontextualized technology that ought to be easily transferred across contexts. And of specific concern to the theme of this book, it also...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Multilingual Matters
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1847695957
• ISBN 13: 9781847695956
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 252
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland