The power of language ideologies: Designer immigrants learning English in Singapore

This critical ethnographic school-based case study focuses on the language learning experiences of five Asian immigrant students who were specially recruited by the Singapore government as part of a national foreign talent policy. It draws on varied data gathered over an academic year, including video- and audio-taped classroom interactions. audio-taped interviews with the focal students and their Singaporean classmates and teachers, observations of the students outside of the classroom, and artifacts. Inspired by the work of Blommaert (2010). Bourdieu (1991), Pennycook (2010), and Wortham (2006), this study adopts a poststructuralist view of language and language learning. Specifically, language is seen as an act of semiotic reconstruction and performance engaged by the language learner. Particular attention was paid to how the immigrant students negotiated a standard English ideology and their discursive positioning over the course of the school year. The study also considers how the prevailing standard English ideology interacted in highly complex ways with their being positioned as high academic achievers to ultimately influence their learning of English. In particular, I argue that this potent combination of language ideologies and circulating ideologies created a designer student immigration complex. By framing this situation as a complex, the study problematizes the power of ideologies in shaping the trajectories of language learners.