Teo, Peter

"While academic and media discourses have paid considerable attention to students' achievements in standardised language and literacy examinations, which typically assess a narrow set of literacy skills, there is a dearth of studies of Singapore classrooms that describe and critically assess the full range of literate practices which students are given access to. In the wake of the pro-active 1998 national initiative of Thinking Schools, Learning Nation, a new syllabus in subject English and a revised, inquiry-based curricula in content subjects like Science were launched, and a new, hybrid subject in upper secondary, Social Studies, which foregrounds critical thinking, was created - all of these initiatives making for new and broader literacy demands, for which many teachers have not been sufficiently professionally prepared."-- [p. 1] of executive summary.