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- Title
‘I don’t speak Singlish’ – linguistic chutzpah and denial in the ELT classroom.
- Authors
Lu, Luke
- Abstract
In Singapore, dominant narratives of Singlish as ‘bad English’ and an impediment to acquiring the Standard co-exist with discourses about Singlish as a marker of Singaporean identity. One consequence of such competing discourses has been characterised as a polarity between linguistic anxiety about Singaporeans’ proficiency in Standard English on the one hand, and rationalised confidence in using both registers appropriately on the other [that Wee (2014) terms ‘linguistic chutzpah’]. This paper examines a third phenomenon that is neither exclusively anxiety nor chutzpah in a specific site where metapragmatic evaluations of Englishes abound – the ELT classroom. Drawing on data from a bidialectal programme of Standard English and Singlish in a secondary school, I observe that while some students portrayed confidence in reasoning how Singlish might be appropriate in certain contexts, there are also instances where the same student might deny being a user of Singlish. Such denial may not be construed as anxiety, but a reflection of the unequal values of Englishes in wider society, even when bidialectalism may be promoted in the classroom.
- Subjects
ENGLISH language education; ENGLISH language usage; PRAGMATICS; MULTIDIALECTALISM; APPLIED linguistics; SOCIOLINGUISTICS
- Publication
International Journal of Educational Research (22196064), 2023, Vol 47, Issue 2, p136
- ISSN
2519-6146
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.36771/ijre.47.7.23-pp136-173