Teo, Peter

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.

Effective teaching, among other things, can be seen as a series of orchestrated moves between different kinds and levels of knowledge, be they between personal, everyday and technical knowledge, between school knowledge and the world beyond, and between knowledge in different disciplines. This article is about bridging the gap between what students learn in school and their out-of-school experiences. It focuses on the dimension of connected learnings,which is one part of a three-dimensional analytic framework developed for a study in Singapore. By examining transcripts of English language and social studies lessons in Singapore secondary schools, this article shows how teachers can make what is taught in the classroom relevant to the outside world as well as incorporate and infuse students' prior knowledge and out-of-school experiences into classroom teaching. It argues that such connected learnings not only increases motivation and engagement levels for the students but also makes learning more meaningful and purposeful. In this sense, students are no longer just learning basic literacy competencies within an academic context but endeavour to develop life skills that take them beyond classrooms and examination halls. Put simply, they are going beyond learning how to read and write, rather reading and writing in order to learn.

Inspired by Bakhtin's theory of dialogism and framed within the paradigm of ‘dialogic teaching’, this article focuses on teacher talk and its potential for encouraging student discussion, dialogue and debate. Through a close analysis of lessons taught by 18 teachers in 7 schools, it examines the teachers' attempts to initiate and stimulate discussion among pre-university students in Singapore. The findings point to a pattern of teacher talk that stifles student participation and cognitive engagement, producing a predominantly monologic and transmissive classroom culture. The article closes with a discussion of the implications for teachers, teacher educators and educational policy makers.

This article focuses on the discursive construction of national identity through a National Day Rally speech delivered by Singapore's Prime Minister in 2010. Inspired by the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis and using methods developed by Halliday and van Leeuwen, it offers a close analysis of the speech, which uncovers patterns related to the type, extent and effects of various agentive roles attributed to the country, government and people of Singapore. Macro-discursive strategies like the use of specific references and real-life anecdotes calculated to reify the success of the Singapore 'brand' and inspire Singaporeans are also discussed. Through this multi-layered analysis, the article demonstrates how discourse transforms an imagining of Singapore's nationhood into a concrete image of what Singapore is and what being a Singaporean is all about.

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 proposed study focuses on a key competency in the 21st century landscape -- critical thinking -- as it is manifest in the classroom talk of pre university students in Singapore's Junior College (JC) system. 'Critical thinking' here refers to the students' ability and willingness to question and challenge views and opinions. More broadly, it describes a classroom culture which encourages students to actively participate in discussion and debate as part of the process of knowledge (de)construction. The purpose of the study is to explore the dialogic space in Singapore pre-university classrooms to ascertain the extent to which teachers and students are able to co construct knowledge and learning. Through observations and systematic analysis of classroom talk in General Paper lessons in five selected junior colleges in Singapore, the study aims to produce findings that will fill several important gaps. First, it attempts to make visible and explicit the process of knowledge construction amidst the vagaries of classroom talk by probing into the discursive structures of dialogic teaching. By adapting a coding scheme aimed at making transparent and explicit the nature and workings of dialogic teaching, the study hopes to contribute to our understanding of how students can be steered towards constructing their own knowledge rather than simply assimilating knowledge transmitted to them by their teacher. Secondly, there is a dearth of empirical data on pre-university classroom teaching in Singapore, as most classroom corpora tend to focus on primary or secondary levels of schooling. Seen as the crucial, preparatory stage for university education, education at the pre-university level therefore constitutes a vital link to the academic literacies that students at the university level are expected to possess and display. The findings of this study will illuminate not only the teaching of a key subject in Singapore's junior college curriculum, but also potentially of different disciplines due to the inter-disciplinary nature of General Paper. Thirdly, the proposed study will also contribute significantly towards preparing students for the 21st century, since one of its key competencies relates to critical thinking. Finally, the corpus of classroom data collected, both audio and video, will constitute valuable capacity-building resources for pre-service teacher education or even professional development of in-service teachers. The findings will make teacher educators themselves more cognizant of how teacher talk drives learning, leading hopefully to the reshaping of curricular content to focus more sharply on the important role of classroom talk in education.

This study focuses on a series of videos aimed at teacher recruitment in Singapore and how they are used as an ideological tool for persuasion. By adopting a multimodal critical discourse analysis approach to focus on affect, it examines how these videos create and promulgate the ideology of an ideal teacher as one who is caring, encouraging and supportive of students. The analysis shows how affect is not only embodied in and performed by the primary protagonists in the video narratives through their action, facial expression, posture and speech. It is also evoked through various secondary meaning-making modes, such as focus, angle, lighting, background music and setting, through which the narratives unfold. More importantly, it demonstrates how affect is used not only as a means to arouse and engage viewers’ sensibilities but also as a persuasive strategy to manufacture and manage particular social and economic realities in contemporary society.

In the past two decades, there has been a call for educators around the whole to prepare students for the 21st century to help them navigate an increasingly globalized world and inter-connected landscape. This creates a need for educators to equip students with a holistic education that emphasizes life skills like communication, cross-cultural collaboration, and critical thinking. Against this backdrop, this paper examines the viability of ‘dialogic teaching’ as a pedagogy for the 21st century. The paper begins with a discussion of the features of the 21st century education landscape and the principles and tenets of ‘dialogic teaching’. It then surveys and synthesizes the findings of empirical studies in various parts of the world focusing on the role of discourse in fostering dialogic interactions, with a focus on language learning, in order to establish possible links between dialogic teaching and the demands of the 21st century. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the challenges and implications of adopting a dialogic approach to teaching as a pedagogy for the 21st century.