Abstract
This chapter starts with an explanation of the national recruitment system that is currently in place to procure designer immigrant students for Singapore secondary schools. The general overview of the recruitment scholarship process as expedited by the Ministry of Education in Singapore is supplemented by details of how an immigrant student recruitment exercise at Oak was conducted. Following a description of the ‘benevolent’ cosmopolitan ethos that characterized the school culture at Oak, I make the case that the designer immigrant students, as scholarship recipients, were seen as ‘fortunate’ because of their perceived deprived backgrounds. Such a positioning is complexified by an analysis of two overlapping circulating ideologies (Wortham, Learning identity: The joint emergence of social identification and academic learning. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) surrounding designer immigrant students at Oak, which collectively constitute what I call the designer student immigrant complex. The chapter closes with an examination of how these ideologies interact with language ideologies to construct these students as high performing students, which in turn impacted their language acquisition experience.
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Notes
- 1.
Asian countries were targeted because the government wanted to maintain an Asian composition in Singapore society.
- 2.
ASEAN = Association of South East Nations, comprising Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
- 3.
lor = a Singapore English particle used for emphatic effect.
- 4.
One reason why Mr. Liew and the other teachers at Oak may have singled out the students from China as being representative of the designer immigrant students is that the Chinese students constituted the largest proportion of the scholarship recipients. Moreover, China had been the first source of immigrant students tapped at Oak. At the time of my study, recruitment from China was in its ninth year.
- 5.
The grading system for all subjects in the national “O” level examinations range from A1 (the best grade) to F9 (the worst grade). Any grade below C6 (i.e., D7, E8 and F9) constitutes a fail.
- 6.
In Singapore, entry to the junior college (Grades 11 and 12) is measured according to student performance in the national “O” level (Grade 10) exam. Exam scores are assigned both letter and number grades (e.g., A1, A2, B3, B4, C5 etc.). A student’s L1R5 score comprises her first language (L1) score and scores in five other subjects (R5). A student who gets six A1s in the exam will have an L1R5 of 6 (i.e., a perfect score). Students from China were advantaged by the fact that Chinese is one of the four languages offered for L1 examination, the other three L1 languages being English, Malay, and Tamil.
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De Costa, P.I. (2016). Designer Student Immigration and the Designer Student Immigrant Complex at Oak. In: The Power of Identity and Ideology in Language Learning. Multilingual Education, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30211-9_5
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