Singapore is an ethnically, linguistically, and culturally diverse nation-state that has always practiced deliberate language policy and planning. The bilingual education policy, introduced shortly after the young nation's independence has led to the emergence of English-knowing bilinguals who are proficient in both English and their ethnically…

This research investigated the relation between racial categorization and implicit racial bias in majority and minority children. Chinese and Indian 3- to 7-year-olds from Singapore (N = 158) categorized Chinese and Indian faces by race and had their implicit and explicit racial biases measured. Majority Chinese children, but not minority Indian…

Objective: This study investigated the extent to which the efficacy of a hypertension awareness programme in Singapore may differ based on age, gender, race and housing type (as proxy for income). Method: Pre- and post-programme survey responses on blood pressure (BP) knowledge and beliefs from 9,960 grade 5 students were assessed. Post-programme…

Increasing societal and linguistic diversity poses significant challenges to formative categories of language policies. We make this point via an examination of Singapore's management of its most linguistically diverse ethnic group, the Indians. While heterogeneity has always been Singapore's defining feature, the nature and scale of recent…

The article seeks to formulate a comparative framework that explains the uneven development of schooling in Cyprus and Singapore during the British colonial rule. It specifically focuses on the moment of transition to independence and on the role played by ideas and the interaction of ideas in the evolution of social institutions. The overall…

Informed by family language policy (FLP) as the theoretical framework, I illustrate in this paper how language ideologies can be incongruous and language policies can be conflicting through three multilingual families in Singapore representing three major ethnic groups--Chinese, Malay and Indian. By studying their family language audits, observing…

This paper addresses the phenomenon of Language Maintenance and Language Shift through a qualitative study of Tamil language in the family domain in Singapore. The influence of Singapore's bilingual policy and the institutional support offered for maintenance of Tamil language provide the context in which the central research problem of the status…

In this article, we explore the potential of social media for production and distribution of ideas, public deliberation, and political participation, and as civil spaces and public platforms. We offer an analytical template for critically examining images, discursive structures, and multicultural civic participation promoted by websites aimed at…

This article describes the phonological awareness and English writing skills among a sample of 297 Singaporean kindergarten children, stratified by ethnicity (Chinese, Malay, and Indian), and examines the relationship between oral language and writing skills in this multilingual population. Overall, Singaporean kindergartners, nearly all of whom…

To examine the relationship between phonological awareness (PA) and English word-level reading among a multilingual sample, a random sample of 297 Singaporean kindergartners, stratified by ethnicity (169 Chinese, 65 Malay, and 63 Indian), were tested on their PA, receptive vocabulary, and word-level reading skills. Singaporean kindergartners are…

The authors investigate whether there were significant differences in preferences for, familiarity with, and identification of Chinese, Malay, and Indian music between adolescent students from Singapore (n = 78) and the United Kingdom (n = 53). Also explored are the relationships among these three variables. Students were asked to rate their…

This paper tells a tentative story from the preliminary findings of The Sociolinguistic Survey of Singapore, 2006 (SSS 2006). Though the main study reports on language use amongst Chinese, Malay and Indian communities, my focus is only on Indian homes. The paper reports results from five domains: school, family and friends, media, public space and…

This paper reports on an investigation of the effect of religion on language use in Singapore. Data come from the Sociolinguistic Survey of Singapore, 2006, a large-scale language survey linked to follow-up studies. The conceptual framework was based upon Castells' idea of a new social order in the network society; the main research questions were…

Singapore is unique in that it has not only embraced English as one of its official languages, but has made the language of its colonizers the "de facto" working language of the nation and the sole medium of instruction in all its schools, while assigning its other three official languages, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil, an L2 status in the…

Singaporean preschool teachers are responsible for preparing their young students for a formal education that is predominantly conducted in English. What these teachers believe about how young children learn English literacy skills is important to study, especially when much of the research is situated in very different contexts. Talking to…