Singapore Stories: Language, Class, and the Chinese of Singapore, ...

the function of language in teaching and learning, on the one hand, with perceived cultural sensitivities on the other. The report is of critical value, as it shapes and prescribes future directions in the state of literacy for the general population and sets the guidelines through which later policies in language, schooling, and instruction are framed. The APR was followed by the Final Report in 1963, which outlined the problems faced by educators and the obstacles toward raising general education and literacy rates. Both of these official documents are recognised in this book as being key sources, as is the Ministry of Education report (also known as the Goh report) of 1979. The Goh report serves to highlight the continued high rates of attrition within the education system throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the generally low levels of Englishliteracy within the general population. As a lead-in to this study’s analysis of the 1980s and 1990s, the Goh report is crucial in establishing general trends in literacy and education at the start of the “economic miracle” epoch.

How, alongside the voices from below, can the statistical recordson literacy best be used to facilitate a study that illustrates the microeconomic impact of English on class and everyday life? In Literacy, Schooling and Revolution, Colin Lankshear and Moira Lawler provide a useful basis from which an analysis of the influence of literacy over the process of socioeconomic stratification can be anchored. The authors propose that literacy should be understood as a social construction, “forged in the process of humans pursuing values, goals and interests, under conditions where some groups have greater access to structural power than others”. ¹ It is hence critical that literacy be looked upon not simply as a skill or tool but as an opportunity or chance in everyday life that may or may not be accessible to an individual. Even when it is made available, the degree of access is often dependent on a number of variables within the household, such as economic resource ownership and other forms of support.

What does this book take to mean whether an individual is literatein a particular language? As this study is not being produced for asociolinguistic audience, it adopts a minimalist conceptualisation of the