From Language Skills to Literacy ― Broadening the Scope of English Language Education Through Media 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.

Csilla Weninger is associate professor in the department of English Language and Literature at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. Her research examines the imprint and impact of political and institutional ideologies on the conduct of schooling, including its material dimensions such as textbooks as well as everyday pedagogies. Her publications have appeared, among others, in Teaching and Teacher Education, Discourse, TESOL Quarterly, Linguistics and Education, and ELT Journal.