Anneliese Kramer-Dahl

The legacy of instrumentality in policy and pedagogy in the teaching of English: the case of Singapore

Combining two metaphors we argue that apart from official educational policy, there exists a palimpsest of cumulatively added prior policies sedimented in teachers’ pedagogy, in addition to quasi‐official phantom policies formed at the local level. We argue that these affect teachers’ practices and beliefs in ways that may run counter to the desire of policy‐makers to change educational regimes. Using research from a two‐year long professional development project with teachers from two Singaporean secondary schools, we contend that while the top is busily redesigning the education system in general, and language and literacy teaching in particular, in ways that foster enquiry and higher‐level work with a wide range of texts, in the micro‐context of the classroom a long‐standing instrumentalist logic prevails. We conclude that innovators need to be very cognisant of the legacy of past written and unwritten policies embedded in teachers’ practices and beliefs when planning and engaging in professional development work.

‘Reading’ the Home and Reading in School: Framing Deficit Constructions as Learning Difficulties in Singapore English Classrooms

Half of the students in the Normal (Technical) stream leave their classroom every day not understanding their lessons. They spend less than an hour a day studying. One in four said they had difficulty studying because their English was poor. At home, they speak mainly Mandarin or dialect. Poor study skills and habits are common. These students have trouble concentrating and listening in class, so they also have difficulty remembering what has been taught. They also manage their time poorly (Tan, 1996)

Abuses of grammar teaching: the role of crisis discourse in appropriating a potentially innovative language syllabus for Singapore schools

In 1999 the issue of grammar and its teaching re-emerged in Singapore as a topic of great intensity in a government-managed media debate. As studies in other educational contexts have shown, debates about grammar in political discussions and in the media typically proceed in terms of a discourse of crisis and falling standards. More specifically, in Singapore this anxiety over language and correctness has repeatedly served to take attention away from a concern with how literacy is effectively taught. My particular interest is in the ways in which this discourse of crisis fuelled by the media, and the nationwide in-service English grammar course which was offered in its wake as a quick-fix solution, impacted on the English Language Syllabus that was introduced at the same time. I undertake a critical reading of the English grammar course materials for teachers, their assumptions about grammar and what grammar teaching is for, and how they could seriously interfere with, and co-opt, a potentially innovative syllabus which foregrounds generic competency and grammar as a social meaning-making resource.