Negotiating what counts as English language teaching: official curriculum and its enactment in two Singaporean secondary classrooms

Building teachers' creative capabilities in Singapore's English classrooms: a way of contesting pedagogical instrumentality

“…These findings are corroborated by Kramer‐Dahl (forthcoming), who examined English literacy practices in Singapore secondary schools. Frequently, the teacher is acknowledged to be “the interpretative authority on the text for the students … [she] mediates the text to the students” (McDonald, 2004, p. 18).…”

“…For example, a component of the syllabus is the focus on language use for “literacy response and expression”, which aims to prepare students to respond creatively and critically to literary texts, relate them to personal experiences and prior knowledge and use language creatively to express their identities. But when the syllabus is translated into classroom practice, it is done “through the layers of frequently idiosyncratic and localised ‘mediation’ and translation that are inevitable in top‐down administered educational systems, such as textbooks, in‐service programs, departmental unit plans and their own lesson plans” (Kramer‐Dahl, forthcoming, p. 6). When the curriculum is ultimately enacted in the classroom, it uses a narrow range of textual forms and organisational ‘rules’ that students are asked to reproduce.…”

Assessment and the logic of instructional practice in Secondary 3 English and mathematics classrooms in Singapore

“…As we indicated at the beginning of the article, this is hardly new news to Singaporean teachers, parents, students—or researchers. Indeed, as we saw earlier, Kramer‐Dahl () and others have long emphasized the limits the assessment regime imposes on instructional practice, even when there is a strongly reformist English syllabus in place nationally to support instructional innovation. Similarly, teachers we interviewed in 2010 as part of our larger research program express remarkably similar constructions of the challenges they face in trying to reconcile the demands of the TLLM initiative and the imperatives of high stakes assessment.…”

“…He notes in particular that the introduction of a key pedagogical reform in English in the 1990s—process writing—was ‘hampered by the emphasis on examinations in the school system’. More recently, Anneliese Kramer‐Dahl (), in her research on the implementation of the 2001 English syllabus in Singapore in 2006 and 2007, similarly reports that the English teachers she and her colleagues studied closely repeatedly retreated from the innovative pedagogy of the 2001 EL syllabus and fell back instead to the default position of an examination‐driven instructional regime in order that their students be properly prepared for school‐based and national high stakes assessments. ‘Indeed’, she writes, ‘“exams”, “practice” and “back to basics” were keywords reiterated over and over in our interviews and in the classroom, often juxtaposed against what they see as an all‐too‐unrealistic “advanced thinking and literacy” discourse of the syllabus’.…”

“…You can't draw the line, not in the Asian context, because it's very very obvious, you know. (Kramer‐Dahl, , p. 94)…”