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Research has seen a growing recognition of the crucial role pronunciation plays in teaching English as an International Language (EIL), in achieving effective communication and its close link to the mastery of other aspects of language teaching and learning. In spite of its recognised importance, pronunciation is still a marginalised skill in many EIL programmes due to EIL teachers’ lack of required phonetic and phonological knowledge, and the paucity of comprehensive coverage targeted at EIL learners. While there has been much research on phonetic and phonological features of world varieties of English, there has not been a strong research–practice nexus in the field. There is therefore a need to comprehensively review EIL pronunciation teaching, to document what previous research tells us, and to discuss how research can be translated into practice. This article aims to cover a range of current issues concerning EIL pronunciation modelling and theorising, and provides a brief articulation of the current issues surrounding the global spread of English and its theoretical development. Specifically, it considers current EIL research issues, challenges, and their implications for pronunciation practice. It also considers the implications of Gardner’s (2008) Five Minds for the Future for EIL pronunciation teaching and postulates the necessity of a sixth mind to navigate the field in the post-pandemic era.

This article offers finer-grained acoustic analyses of two aspects of the linguistic sound system of Japanese English (JpE): monophthongal vowels and rhythmic patterning. At the segmental level, th...

This chapter will bring together major published works on English in East and South Asia (EESA). It will be organised around themes such as (1) “General works on EESA” and (2) “Works on varieties of EESA”, i.e. Chinese English, Japanese English, Korean English, Indian English, Pakistani English and Sri Lankan English. Under the second theme, the bibliographic references will be categorised according to the three focal areas of the volume, namely, “policy”, “features” and “language in use”. Only published books, book chapters, journal articles, conference proceedings and unpublished doctoral dissertations will be included in this bibliography. Our aim is to provide an up-to-date resource for all interested in the research on EESA.

In 2011, “student-centric, values-driven” was introduced by the Ministry of Education as the theme for educational reform and innovation in Singapore, with the goal of ensuring all children the opportunity to develop holistically and maximize their potential. To actualize this ambitious and encompassing vision, Singapore has developed the Framework for 21st Century Competencies and Student Outcomes. By instilling in students core values and competencies deemed crucial in the 21st century, the expectation is that they can each grow into a confident person, a self-directed learner, an active contributor, and a concerned citizen. To achieve these desired outcomes of education, Singapore has been striving to ensure what has been termed “the 4 Everys”: every school a good school; every child an engaged learner; every teacher a caring educator; every parent a supportive partner. Since then, the priority of education in multicultural, multiracial, and multilingual Singapore has been diversity and multiple pathways to success, such that each individual child can reach his or her potential. Key to every good school is the quality of teachers and school leaders. Therefore, Singapore has developed a comprehensive and structured system in teacher/principal recruitment, deployment, preparation, and development. To make every school a good school, Singapore also invests heavily in education and resources schools for them to provide customized programs to satisfy the varied needs, interests, and talents of their students. To ensure that every child is an engaged learner, educational resources and extra learning support are provided to maximize educational opportunities. The curriculum is also constantly revamped to provide students with more opportunities for holistic development and support for their many capacities. For every teacher to emerge as a caring educator, teachers and school leaders are provided with a comprehensive and structured mentoring system to enable them to grow personally and professionally. To help every parent to be a supportive partner, efforts have been made to communicate with, engage, and educate parents via education materials, workshops, talks, and funds. In addition, there are close partnerships among schools, parents, and communities. Three principles guide Singapore’s education reforms: (a) maintaining a clear and progressive vision, (b) working both systemically and systematically, and (c) equitable leveling up. What binds the nation’s core principles of ensuring a progressive, long-haul vision of education is the unwavering belief that students sit at the center of all educational reform endeavors.

While teacher retention is a pressing issue for many jurisdictions, Singapore has a relatively low teacher attrition rate. Drawing on the experiences of student teachers from the sole institute for...

The ASEAN region is home to great ethnic, cultural, political and economic diversity and linguistically, represents a region where both Outer and Expanding Circle varieties of English are spoken. English is designated as the sole working language of the ASEAN region but in reality, it has a different status and performs very different roles in each ASEAN member state. This article first provides an overview of the spread of English in Southeast Asia. It then looks at English language policies in each of the Outer and Expanding Circle ASEAN countries, and discusses issues including models and norms of spoken English and intelligibility concerns. The article concludes by emphasizing that global–local tensions in the use of English in each of the ASEAN contexts should be taken into consideration. There is also the need to strike a balance between the existing tensions in order for the region to compete in the globally connected landscape of the 21st century.

This paper explores how thinking and values in student teachers are cultivated in the Singapore context, via a case study of a teacher educator selected based on having won excellence in teaching c...

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.

This 4-wave longitudinal study examined how starting teachers' retention intentions changed over three years. One-way repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) found a significant main effect of time on retention intention. Two-way ANOVA also showed a significant main effect of pre-teaching work experience, and years of work experience on retention intention. However, there was no significant interaction effect between time and pre-teaching work experience, and between time and years of prior work experience. These findings suggest that prior work experience in other professions and length of working years did not make a difference in starting teachers’ retention intentions over time.

This paper presents findings of an acoustic investigation of monophthong vowels produced by learners of English from Yunnan, China. Speech data for the present study were collected from 15 participants comprising five Han Chinese English majors, five Han Chinese non-English majors and five Yi minority ethnic English majors. The findings show that the three groups share more differences than similarities in terms of vowel duration but not in terms of vowel quality though the results of Euclidean distance show that the Han Chinese English majors and the Han Chinese non-English majors are different from the Yi minority ethnic English majors. Results of standard deviation reveal that the Yi minority ethnic English majors have the lowest inter-speaker variability, followed by the Han Chinese English majors and the Han Chinese non-English majors.

In this article, we examine quality teachers through teacher leadership development. Using Singapore as an illustrative case, we describe the redefinition of the teaching profession to include deliberate structures and multiple pathways designed to nurture teacher leaders, and the role of teacher leaders in supporting education reform. We go on to outline possible lessons or principles that could be educative to other systems regardless of local context or particulars. We end with reflections about the priorities that should be focal in the continuing quest for educational excellence—and equity—whether in Singapore or elsewhere in the world.

This chapter describes how two high-performing educational systems, Ontario, Canada and Singapore, create policy systems designed to ensure quality teaching across communities, and compares their systematic approaches to the much less coherent policy system in the United States. These cases are drawn from a recently completed study of international teaching policy, with colleagues, seven jurisdictions within five countries around the world that have worked to develop comprehensive teaching policy systems. The chapter explores a multi-method, multiple case study design to investigate the policies and practices that support teaching quality within education systems. It discusses the Ontario and Singapore cases here because in some ways, they are most like states in the US in their size and student demographics. Ontario is one of the highest-performing provinces in one of the highest-performing countries in the world; 28 percent of its students are immigrants, nearly twice the proportion in the United States.

Research on English in Singapore has been the topic of many studies from the late 1970s to the present. Past surveys on the topic have tended to focus on the phasing of the study of Singapore English, rather than on the broader issue of English in Singapore per se. From the late 1990s, we see the birth of a new generation of scholars on Singapore English whose doctoral dissertations have focused on Singapore English, and who have focused on the systematic, features-based linguistic description of Singapore English as well as the broader consideration of English in Singapore in general. The present paper takes its reference from an up-to-date compilation of published works of English in Singapore and doctoral dissertations, and attempts a meta-analysis via a systematic coding of all the works done. A critical evaluation of what existing research implies about the theoretical modelling of English in Singapore and areas requiring further research will be elucidated in the final section.

The subtle juncture cues in older varieties of English such as Received Pronunciation can be difficult for speakers of new English varieties to perceive. This study looks at the perception of word juncture characteristics in three varieties of English (British, Hong Kong and Singapore) among British, Hong Kong and Singaporean listeners in order to widen our understanding of English juncture characteristics in general. We find that, even though reaction time data indicates that listeners perform quickest in the variety they are most familiar with, not only are juncture differences in British English difficult for Hong Kong and Singaporean listeners to perceive, they are also the most difficult for British listeners. Juncture characteristics in Hong Kong English are the easiest to distinguish among the three varieties.

Previous work on the rhythm of Malaysian English has been based on impressionistic observations. This paper utilizes acoustic analysis to measure the rhythmic patterns of Malaysian English. Recordings of the read speech and spontaneous speech of 10 Malaysian English speakers were analyzed and compared with recordings of an equivalent sample of Singaporean English speakers. Analysis was done using two rhythmic indexes, the PVI and VarcoV. It was found that although the rhythm of read speech of the Singaporean speakers was syllable-based as described by previous studies, the rhythm of the Malaysian speakers was even more syllable-based. Analysis of the syllables in specific utterances showed that Malaysian speakers did not reduce vowels as much as Singaporean speakers in cases of syllables in utterances. Results of the spontaneous speech confirmed the findings for the read speech; that is, the same rhythmic patterning was found which normally triggers vowel reductions.