Teo, Peter

The aim of this paper is to connect criticality and Christianity by showing how the notion of criticality as an embodiment of a critical disposition that translates into action reflects and reinforces some of the teachings in the Bible. The article unfolds in three sections. The first discusses the notion of criticality from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a socially committed praxis that exposes how everyday text and talk reproduces inequalities and inequities in society. In the second, I show how this focus on social injustice in CDA is aligned with biblical teachings about the importance of care, compassion and kindness as modelled by Jesus Himself. Finally, I offer guidelines on how this criticality can be cultivated in the English language classroom by encouraging learners to (1) read to question and (2) write to challenge assumptions and ideologies embedded in everyday texts that perpetuate social inequality and injustices. In doing so, it is hoped that the imperative to foster a critical disposition in learners can meet, mesh and coalesce with the mandate to live out our Christian faith.

"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.

The focus of this study is on the reflective practice and professional development of teachers. It takes a corpus-based, evidence-driven approach in making use of authentic classroom data collected from local classrooms to facilitate the reflective practice and professional growth of English Language teachers in Singapore.

This paper draws on the findings of a three-year, observation-cum-intervention research project that focuses on the textual practices of middle school teachers in Singapore. Specifically, the focus here is on the teaching of suspense narratives to a class of average, lower middle school students as part of the 'text-type' syllabus adopted in Singapore's schools since 2001. The paper will reveal, through close analysis of a unit of work and two lesson transcripts, how one English teacher constructs, scaffolds and implements a series of lessons to develop her students' awareness of and competency in the construction and deconstruction of suspense in narrative writing. It argues that it is the teacher's ability to make use of connected learnings and explicit instruction to raise the overall intellectual quality of her lessons that contributes to the development of her students' textual competence. The paper closes with a critical appraisal of the lessons and a discussion of the implications this study has for writing teachers and researchers.

Despite the proliferation of scholarly studies on social media in recent years, not many have focused on male social media influencers in the beauty industry, which is often viewed as a feminine preserve with the vast majority of ‘beauty influencers’ being female. This study focuses on the discursive practices of two male beauty influencers to examine how their visual self-portrayal contributes to their popularity and influence. A total of 752 photographs collected from their Instagram accounts were examined using a visual appraisal framework adapted from Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory described in The Language of Evaluation, focusing on normality, capacity and authenticity. The authors’ findings show that both influencers, who are openly gay, portray themselves as gender norm transgressors whose performance of capacity and authenticity as social media celebrities is a highly contested and conflictual aspect of their identity construction as beauty influencers. These findings not only shed light on the visual discursive processes and practices through which beauty influencers perform their aesthetic labour to enhance their popularity and influence but they also contribute to our understanding of how they perpetuate mediatized and marketized stereotypes of beauty and being as part of the broader sociocultural phenomenon of the celebrification of social media influencers in contemporary society.

Shadow education, or supplementary private tutoring, has expanded to become a multi-billion-dollar industry worldwide, capitalising on the desires of parents and their children to succeed and excel in education. In doing so, shadow education draws upon and reproduces cultural capital represented by knowledge, skills and educational credentials and symbolic capital constituted in the prestige, privilege and legitimacy of educational achievement. The study on which this article is based adopts a critical discourse analytic approach to examine the websites of five leading private tuition centres in Singapore as seen through the lens of Bourdieu’s concept of capital. The aim is to identify specific forms of cultural capital, examine how they are harnessed for promotional purposes, and show how this reflects and reproduces the forms and representations of educational achievement and success valued in Singapore. Findings offer a deeper understanding of the marketing discourse of shadow education that pivots on the quality of private tutors, success beyond examinations and school, and concrete representations of social distinction and achievement. More significantly, the study contributes to research situated at the nexus of shadow education and Bourdieu’s concept of capital to shed light on how shadow education reflects and magnifies broader socio-cultural orientations and socio-economic structures.

Videos are increasingly being used by organizations and corporations all over the world, both private and public, as an effective mode of communication to purvey their goods and services. One such organization is Singapore’s Ministry of Education (MOE), which has produced a series of video advertisements aimed at teacher recruitment. As official discourses, they represent one channel through which the MOE constructs and articulates its ideals and expectations of the teaching profession in Singapore. In recent years, the focus of the video advertisements has been on the “caring teacher.” This study aims to uncover the ideologies surrounding the construction of the caring teacher by investigating how teacher identity and agency are articulated through a teacher recruitment video. A multimodal discourse framework (Baldry and Thibault 2006) is adopted to unpack the different meanings expressed in and through the MOE’s 2011 teacher recruitment video. A macroanalysis drawing on the phasal analysis framework (Baldry and Thibault 2006) and the visual semantics stratum (Lim 2007) is first carried out. This is followed by a microanalysis drawing on Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2004) systemic-functional model and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) visual analysis framework. The caring teacher is revealed as one whose role and identity are explicitly student-centric, although the impact of her actions on the student is unclear. Questions are also raised on the blurring of the teacher’s professional and personal identities and the practicality of teachers displaying such attributes as embodied in the video.

In recent times, the world has seen an unprecedented increase in the number of refugees seeking asylum and refuge from war, conflict, and persecution. This study focuses on five refugee children in Malaysia and how their knowledge, skills, and lived experiences could be harnessed to support their education, well-being, and social inclusion. The study adopts a Funds of Knowledge (FoK) approach, which capitalises on an individual’s knowledge, skills, experiences and practices to support one’s well-being. Data comprised observations of the refugees both in and out of school, interviews with the refugees and their parents/guardians, and artefacts. Collected over an approximately one-year period, the data were coded to identify the FoK that could be used to support the refugees’ learning, well-being, and social inclusion. Five main FoK types centred on Interest, Literacy Practice, Family, Religion and Aspiration were identified. The paper concludes with a discussion of the ways in which FoK can be viewed as a viable approach to facilitate the education and social integration of refugees in Malaysia and beyond.