Abstract
Singapore is known for its linguistic diversity and a bilingual language policy that encourages English plus one other ‘mother tongue,’ including Tamil, Chinese, and Malay. The official educational language policy for Singapore is quadrilingual (Silver and Bokhorst-Heng, this volume), and each of the chapters in this section shows various ways in which the government and the Ministry of Education (MOE) attempt to promote all four languages. Yet, the linguistic ecology appears to be changing rapidly, with English becoming the dominant language in both educational and noneducational contexts. In this commentary, I reflect on what the growing prominence of English might mean for Singaporean education and educational language policy around the world.
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Johnson, D.C. (2016). Commentary on ‘Reforms’. In: Elaine Silver, R., Bokhorst-Heng, W. (eds) Quadrilingual Education in Singapore. Education Innovation Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-967-7_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-967-7_18
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