Options
Cultural capital, habitus and reading futures: Middle-class adolescent students’ cultivation of reading dispositions in Singapore
Citation
Loh, C. E., & Sun, B. (2020). Cultural capital, habitus and reading futures: Middle-class adolescent students’ cultivation of reading dispositions in Singapore. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 41(2), 234-252. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2019.1690426
Abstract
The acquisition of cultural capital can only be understood in the light of the formation of habitus, including the socialisation process, and in the context of the field in which any such capital has value. Yet, the relation between cultural capital and habitus is seldom discussed in research. Drawing on the data from focus groups with 96 students and a survey of 5,779 students from six Singapore secondary schools, we analyze how reading as a form of cultural capital is distributed among High-SES, Mid-SES and Low-SES students in Singapore. We show how middle-class practices of intensive immersion in school-valued reading practices is a form of habitus that prepare some students better than others for engaged reading. The findings highlight how reading as a form of cultural capital is operationalized through students’ familial habitus and argues that making visible familial habitus provides insights for transforming institutional habitus for students’ reading futures.
Date Issued
2020
DOI
10.1080/01425692.2019.1690426
Dataset
https://doi.org/10.25340/R4/3Z70TN
Description
This is the final draft, after peer-review, of a manuscript published in British Journal of Sociology of Education. The published version is available online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01425692.2019.1690426