Abstract
Singapore’s education system is set against a multilingual landscape where students learn English and their ethnically ascribed mother tongue in schools, leading to ‘English-knowing bilingualism’. Deliberate language policy and planning, selective teacher recruitment, and rigorous pre-service and continual professional development programmes have all contributed to Singapore’s educational success. Education in the 21st century cannot ignore the forces of globalisation set against the backdrop of the fourth industrial revolution, where digitalisation, interconnectivity, and the breakneck speed of knowledge transfer are taken as a given, and where the problems faced at both global and local levels are highly complex. This chapter argues the need to re-think traditional paradigms and approaches to teacher education, and showcases language teacher education in the 21st century from a Singaporean perspective where bold steps have been taken both to conceptualise and actualise a teacher education programme that aims to prepare future-ready graduates.
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Low, EL. (2020). English Language Teacher Education for Multilingual Singapore: Responding to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In: Tao, W., Liyanage, I. (eds) Multilingual Education Yearbook 2020. Multilingual Education Yearbook. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41211-1_8
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