From Language Skills to Literacy

The narrowing of English language education curriculum in many contexts has negatively impacted classroom teaching and learning. High-stakes standardized testing, scripted curricula, and the commodification of English have converged to challenge socially meaningful classroom literacy instruction that promotes holistic development. Although in different ways, these factors have shaped the teaching of English as both first and second language. How can English educators respond? This book argues that the first step is to take account of the broader policy, political and cultural landscape and to identify the key constraints affecting teachers, students and parents. These will set the broad parameters for developing local pedagogic approaches, while still recognizing the constraints that actively push against them. Using Singapore English language teaching as a case study, this book illustrates how this process can unfold, and how media literacy principles were vernacularized to design English classroom pedagogies that stretched the bounds of what is acceptable and possible in the local context.