Yvonne Pek
Published: 2018
Total Pages: 180
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Singapore's complex sociolinguistic landscape complicates the ways young children learn to speak, read, and write in English for school success and their becoming bilingual. The complexity lies in the discrepancy between the de jure and de facto language policies. At the de jure and ideal level, an English-ethnic Mother Tongue bilingualism is promoted and what counts as bilingualism is the view of acquiring two systems of autonomous, pure, Standard linguistic features. In the de facto policy, English use is dominant across most domains of social life and school examinations privilege students who do well at English but make it less consequential for students to learn their official ethnic Mother Tongue Language such as Malay, Mandarin or Tamil. At the same time, while Standard English is privileged at school, common use of non-standard forms of English including the mixing of linguistic features from Mandarin, Malay, and other Chinese dialects can be found in day to day interactions. I studied the emic perspectives of Singapore Chinese parents, teachers, and children to give voice to their struggles in language use, to better understand how Singapore's bilingual education policy works in the daily lives of Chinese Singaporeans, and to sense what doing language and literacy looks like in Singapore's complex linguistic context. Taking an "interpretive" orientation (Erickson, 1986) to the case study approach (Dyson & Genishi, 2005; Stake, 1995) in this three-article format dissertation, I analyzed interview data, observation fieldnotes, and the recordings of literacy events in the classroom and at home. The major finding is that learning to speak, read, and write English for school success and becoming bilingual is more than just acquiring a technical set of language and literacy skills; the socio-historical-political and -cultural meanings of language are central to (a) how children have differential access language acquisition at home; (b) how children and teachers produce practices that could silence the children's full linguistic repertoires in the classroom; and (c) how a child's informational book sharing in English is complex and meaningful. Implications for policy and practice are drawn.