Wendy D. Bokhorst-Heng

(Re)Constructing Memory: Textbooks, Identity, Nation, and State

This book engages readers in thirteen conversations presented by authors from around the world regarding the role that textbooks play in helping readers imagine membership in the nation. Authors’ voices come from a variety of contexts – some historical, some contemporary, some providing analyses over time. But they all consider the changing portrayal of diversity, belonging and exclusion in multiethnic and diverse societies where silenced, invisible, marginalized members have struggled to make their voices heard and to have their identities incorporated into the national narrative. The authors discuss portrayals of past exclusions around religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, as they look at the shifting boundaries of insider and outsider. This book is thus about “who we are” not only demographically, but also in terms of the past, especially how and whether we teach discredited pasts through textbooks. The concluding chapters provides ways forward in thinking about what can be done to promote curricula that are more inclusive, critical and positively bonding, in increasingly larger and more inclusive contexts.

Overarching Themes, Bilingual Dreams and Multilingual Landscapes: Quadrilingual Education in Singapore

In this chapter, we provide background for understanding the empirical studies reported in this volume. We offer information on language in education in the Singapore context by first explaining why we refer to ‘quadrilingual education’ in Singapore. We then highlight four themes that overarch the educational system as a whole and within which language education is framed. Subsequently, we discuss dreams and idealisations of individual bilingualism, societal multilingualism and education. This leads to a description of the language-in-education system which serves as background to the studies presented in this volume. The chapter closes with a brief introduction to the six parts of the book and the chapters within each part.

The palimpsest layers of pre-service teachers’ literacy autobiographies

In this article, we examine three literacy autobiographies written by pre-service teachers. Narratives are seen as not just stories relating a set of facts, but rather a means by which individuals interpret their experience. Literacy autobiographies are a reflective and interpretive account of one’s development as a literate being. Using the tools of narrative analysis, we (a) examine these stories to understand the processes of literacy development through the experiences of learners’ storied lives; (b) seek to understand the impact that teachers’ literacy journeys have on their view of literacy and literacy education; and (c) explore what these literacy autobiographies reveal about the contributions of teacher reflection to pre-service teacher education. Our analysis points to the importance of personal relationships in the development of literacy, providing the context within which literacy practices give meaning to the literacy events active in the narrators’ lives. We also note a persistent view of traditional forms of literacy in contrast to pre-service teachers’ involvement in multiliteracies, and argue that this gap needs to be addressed in order to prepare teachers for the twenty-first century classroom. We also consider how reflection can be a more intentional aspect of pre-service teacher education to enhance pedagogy and learning.

Reconsidering language shift within Singapore’s Chinese community: A Bourdieusian analysis

Abstract The official narrative told by national census data in Singapore is that of massive language shift within one generation from a myriad of Chinese dialects towards Mandarin and English as dominant home languages. This story of shift is often told in ways that suggest the community completely and pragmatically transformed its practices and allegiances (Jaffe 2007) in alignment with government policy. However, such notions are premised on narrow ideological assumptions of language with fixed attendant linguistic practices. The choices that people make about their language practices and how they identify with language is much more complex that the term “language shift” captures. We employ Bourdieu’s conceptual tools of field, capital and habitus – especially field – to understand the “messier” realities of historical language shift in Singapore alongside a persistence, even a renaissance, in the use of dialects despite government policies and quadrilingual discourses. We anchor our discussion on the Speak Mandarin Campaign, the keystone of continuing government efforts to influence the habitus within the linguistic field. We provide two specific examples: the continued agitation for the use of dialects in the mass media, and the government’s failed attempt to influence a change in family surnames. Singapore’s story problematizes the notion of language shift in multilingual communities. It also raises interesting questions about the nature and impetus of language shift, the socio-political discourses surrounding these shifts, and the complex interplay of government policy and community and personal choices.

Final Words: A Reflective Synthesis

When we began to conceptualise this book, we had a number of core questions in mind, largely emerging from what we see as a contrast between dramatically shifting sociolinguistic practices due to changing demographics and spawned by generational shifts and immigration policy on the one hand yet largely staid language ideology on the other. Language-in-education policy has attempted to manage this tension with periodic revised syllabi, outcomes and pedagogical approaches. At times, the result is linguistic inconsistency and paradox, perhaps most starkly seen in the persistent siloed approach to the teaching and learning of language (which spills even into research) which tends to regard each language in Singapore’s quadrilingual education individually rather than considering bilingualism/biliteracy and translanguaging (Garcia, 2009) practices and pedagogy within quadrilingual education. In this final chapter, we synthesise the ideas and issues in the chapters with reference to four core questions: How does language pedagogy respond to current policies and to social changes in language use? What does language education at the primary level in Singapore currently look like, and how similar or different is the pedagogy used in teaching the four languages? What are current pedagogical innovations in Singapore’s language education landscape? What can other educators, policymakers and researchers learn from Singapore’s challenges and successes at multilingual education?

Style, identity and literacy: English in Singapore

language learner ‘Wes’. Block adopts a very even-handed approach throughout, highlighting the strengths of the work he deals with while pointing out that much of it shares a common weakness in its essentially structuralist conceptualisation of identity (which, he argues, can only be satisfactorily accounted for through a post-structuralist framework). The chapters on adult migrant, foreign language and study abroad settings review the relevant literature and show that the incipient trend of a more explicit and sophisticated approach to identity in SLL research which can already be discerned in the trajectory described in Chapter 3 has developed further in some of the more recent research in these three contexts. Chapter 4 analyses a variety of research undertaken on adult migrants in five widely different social and geographical contexts and concludes that, not least due to increasingly finely grained qualitative research techniques, enquiries show that migrant learners frequently develop new ‘TL(i.e. target language) mediated subject positions’ related principally to the variables of ethnicity, gender, class and so on (as discussed in the second chapter). Chapter 5 focuses on the context of vast numbers of learners studying a foreign language in classrooms in their home countries, and examines research conducted into areas such as interlanguage pragmatics, intercultural learning, textual identity and language play. Chapter 6 describes a number of studies undertaken mainly since the early 1990s which focus on learners being taught the target language at a university or other institution in a country where it is a vernacular (through the European ERASMUS programme, for instance). Block points out that the frequent assumption that such experiences inevitably result in not only significant advances in the communicative competence of the learner but also greater intercultural competence and understanding is by no means always supported by research evidence and that, in fact, ‘enhanced national identity’ is sometimes an outcome of study abroad. He also shows how the salience of a particular variable such as gender (not least through issues of sexual harassment described in some of the work cited) can become extremely influential in its effect on the development of participants’ subject positions. In both Chapters 5 and 6 it is also emphasised that the research bears out the suspicion that many observers would hold intuitively that the opportunities for new ‘TL-mediated subject positions’ (my italics) to develop are generally much fewer in foreign language and study abroad contexts than in migrant settings. Block concludes by arguing that future research should build on the increasing centrality of post-structuralist views of identity in SLL research through further study of the key variable of social class, through problematising the concept of ‘L1’ and by means of a greater focus on the emergence of local lingua francas and the exponential growth of electronically mediated communication. The author eschews unnecessary complexity, and writes in a clear and engaging style. My only significant reservation is that the treatment of certain approaches (those of Claire Kramsch, for example) was not detailed enough to be very useful to readers unfamiliar with the work. The manuscript would also have benefitted from somewhat more meticulous proofreading. In general, however, this book can be highly recommended for those involved in teaching, studying or researching in the field of SLL.