Foreign Talent and Singapore

Abstract

This chapter describes the backdrop of national social engineering against which this Singapore-based study, which explores the language learning experiences of five Grade 9 immigrant students in an English-medium school, is situated. I refer to these students as designer immigrants (Simmons, Economic integration and designer immigrants: Canadian policy in the 1990s. In M. Castro (Ed.), Free markets, open societies, closed borders? Trends in international migration and immigration policy in the Americas (pp. 53–69). Miami: North-South Press, 1999a; Simmons, Immigration policy: Imagined futures. In S. Halli & L. Driedger (Eds.), Immigrant Canada: Demographic, economic and social challenges (pp. 21–50). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999b) as they were recipients of scholarships funded by the Singapore government. By using a language identity (Norton, Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2013), language ideological (Blommaert, The sociolinguistics of globalization. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and circulating ideological (Wortham, Learning identity: The joint emergence of social identification and academic learning. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) framework, I explore the struggles and pressures they encountered in learning English in my year-long critical ethnographic case study. The school became not only a site of control where the interests of the state were promoted, but also a site of struggle for these designer immigrant students as they wrestled with a hegemonic language ideology and a cosmopolitan identity that demanded homogeneity by way of English language standardization. For them, language acquisition was not a gradual and neutral process of internalizing the rules, structures and vocabulary of a standard language. Rather, the dynamics of their language acquisition were entangled with deeper social issues that characterize the nexus of language identity, ideology and migration.