Constructing Adolescents Differently: On The Value of Listening To Singapore Youngsters Talking Popular Culture Texts

Linguistics and Education 15 (2005) 217241
Constructing adolescents differently: On the value of

listening to Singapore youngsters talking popular
culture texts
Anneliese Kramer-Dahl
National Institute of Education, Singapore
Abstract
In contrast to the commonsense discourse of youth-as-unruly widely circulating in the West, the
kind of discourse which has become part of the Singapore public and academic imagination is one that
mobilizes constructions of youth as narrowly achievement-oriented, as exam-smart muggers, who
lack an enquiring mind. This study attempts to complicate this picture of Singaporean adolescents,
showing them to be sophisticated meaning-makers who employ texts of different modes to construct
shifting subjectivities in their everyday lives. It draws on selected focus-group data my students and
I have collected over the past two years from Singaporean 10- to 12-year-olds as they talk with their
peers and us about the texts they like to read and watch in their spare time [Lim, L. E. (2002). Fast
cars and magical cards: A study of gendered choices in cartoons. Singapore: Nanyang Technological
University, Honours Academic Exercise; Seah, H. L. (2003). Gender differences in the reading habits
and attitudes of primary pupils in single-sex government-aided schools in Singapore. MA (applied
linguistics) thesis: Nanyang Technological University]. Building on Moss [Moss, G. (2000). Informal
literacies and pedagogic discourse. Linguistics and Education, 11, 4764; Moss, G. (2001). On literacy
and the social organisation of knowledge inside and outside school. Language and Education, 15,
146161] research on knowledge about informal literacies as a horizontal discourse (Bernstein), in
the discussion of this data I argue that the youngsters whose voices we hear are not entirely trapped
within monochrome schooled literacy practices, even though much of what goes on at home may
reinforce these; rather, in the spaces they make for themselves, they can be seen engaged in an
array of out-of-school activities around texts, displaying special competencies and taking up multiple
reading strategies and positions as they navigate them. Having a better understanding of the kinds of
improper knowledge about literacy that is generated alongside the privileged pedagogized version
in many Singapore homes can not only help complicate our current image of Singaporean youth but
Tel.: +65 67903434; fax: +65 896 9149.

E-mail address: akrame@nie.edu.sg.
0898-5898/$ see front matter 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.linged.2004.12.005
218
A. Kramer-Dahl / Linguistics and Education 15 (2005) 217241
also help re-envision literacy education in schools in ways that the students unsanctioned experiences
and competencies with texts are recognized and built upon.
2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Out-of-school literacy; Popular culture; Vertical and horizontal discourse
1. Introduction
Interviewer:
HW:
Interviewer:
HW:
Interviewer:
HW:
R:
HW:
So you like that about Lets and Go?

Yes. But I dont think Lets and Go is good because they dont go and study and Joey stay in
the shop for three days racing his car and his mother dont care.
You dont think its good but its your most favourite cartoon. Why?
Cartoon is cartoon. Human being is human being. Human being must go home and eat and
study but cartoons never mind, they dont eat they wont die one, they dont study they wont
get scolding.
Ok. You like the cartoon because its a cartoon. But you feel that as a person, they shouldnt do
such things.
Yes.
Cartoons is cartoons. Anything can happen. They jump down 12 storeys also never die.
100 storeys jump down also wont die. Human beings will die.
When thinking about how to contextualize this paper, which aims to make a case for
studying Singapore youngsters after-school literacies, I turned to a review essay by Moje
(2002), in which she critiques the scanty attention some recent key anthologies on literacy
research have paid to adolescents literacy practices. In an anecdotal part of her essay, she
links this marginalization in certain academic circles to the popular discourse of youth-asunruly which she invariably encounters when she talks with adults about her interest in
investigating youngsters and their ways with texts. As she concludes from her experiences,
implicit in peoples dismissive reactions and questions is the assumption that adolescents
resist adults, that working with adolescents is difficult, and perhaps even dangerous (p. 110).
This is no doubt evidence of commonsense discourse about adolescence that, as Leskos
(2001) historical work reminds us, has powerful purchase with both the popular and the
academic imagination: the adolescent as intrinsically resistant and unruly.
As someone studying young people and the ways they enact literacies in the particular sociocultural and political milieu of Singapore, I usually encounter a different set
of stock responses, though equally incredulous or discouraging. Not that youth-as-unruly
or as-raging-hormone (Finders, 1998) discourses are unfamiliar here, especially when
youngsters from putatively at-risk homes and lower-achieving academic streams are the
subject of popular discussion or academic study. But the typical questions my students and
I get asked when telling others about the research with youth in their early teens we do are:
You try to get them to talk about reading out-of-school and other stuff? Do they have any
views of their own? They probably think they have to give you right answers! How much
time do they have to engage with out-of-school texts anyway?
The assumptions that come through here are no doubt shaped by a public discourse as
powerful and debilitating as that Moje ascribes to American adolescents. But it is a kind of
counter-discourse to the dominant discourse available in the West. In the Singapore case,
219
it tends to mobilize constructions of youth as narrowly achievement-oriented, exam-smart

muggers, as local academics have deridingly categorized them, who lack an enquiring
mind (Straits Times, 31 March, 1996), are not likely to read extensively and seek alternative solutions to problems (Chang, 1995: 3) and are deficient in expression and critical
thinking skills (Straits Times, 19 April, 1993). What makes this way of essentializing young
Singaporean literacy learners especially dangerous is that it gets lived out, largely unquestioned, in local research and teaching. The pat explanation for Singapore youth being as
they are is more often than not a cultural one, most authoritatively voiced by Singapores
Senior Minister, Its a whole basic culture of not questioning your teacher. I think weve
got to try and amend or modify our educational system. Or more important, the mindset
(Straits Times, 10 June, 1999). At once, the official and public framing of the problem,
of the affiliated identities, of its sources and potential solutions has become part of the
Singaporean educational imagination and imaginarycirculating as truth in staffrooms,
classrooms, boardrooms and among researchers.
In this paper, Id like to build a more complex image of Singaporean youngsters, showing
them to be sophisticated meaning-makers who employ texts of different modes to construct
shifting subjectivities in their everyday lives. I will do so by drawing on selected focus-group
data my graduate students and I have collected over the past two years from Singaporean 10to 12-year-olds as they talk with their peers and us about the texts they like to read and watch
in their spare time (Lim, 2002; Seah, 2003). An important argument I wish to make as I
discuss this data is that the youngsters whose voices we hear are not entirely trapped within
monochrome schooled literacy practices, drab though their classroom experiences may
often be and however much what goes on at home may reinforce these; rather, in the spaces
they make for themselves, they can be seen engaged in an array of out-of-school activities
around texts, displaying special competencies and taking up multiple reading strategies and
positions as they navigate them. Having a better understanding of the kinds of improper
knowledge about literacy that is generated alongside the privileged pedagogized version
in many Singapore homes can not only help render our current image of Singaporean
youth more complex but also help re-envision literacy education in schools in ways that the
students unsanctioned experiences and competencies with texts are recognized and built
upon.
2. Background: public and academic discourses about Singapore literacy

education
It is not surprising, given the dominant way of thinking about youngsters and their lack
that recent research in Singapore, closely aligned with policy-making, has focused on the
countrys high-stakes examination culture (Cheah, 1998) and the negative impact it has
had on students language and literacy learning, especially in English, the medium of instruction in all schools.1 In pursuit of a narrow range of competencies with texts which
values grammatically and ideationally correct rather than innovative or critical responses,
1 Over the 30 years since Singapores independence, education in English has replaced vernacular education
in all schools. The policy of giving English first language position in schools was implemented for pragmatic
220
this exam-driven literacy (Cheah, 1998) seems to have failed to foster the kind of entrepreneurial spirit and out-of-the-box thinking among the young which, as politicians and
media keep insisting, Singapore so urgently needs to improve its longer-term competitiveness (Gregory & Clarke, 2003: 71; citing Ministry of Trade and Industry, 1998). Rare
instances of homeschool transition research have examined Singapore students diverse
cultural and linguistic backgrounds, often through lenses that view cultural groups in rather
broad sweeps, and have argued that the premium especially the local Chinese and Indian
cultures place on childrens obedience to authority and them being seen but not heard has
hampered the introduction of student-and-talk centered pedagogical practices from abroad
into the English language curriculum (e.g. Sripathy, 1998).
My comments above are by no means intended to dismiss this research, the insights
it has provided, particularly about the compatibility of literacy pedagogies imported from
Western cultures, and the recent shift in the nature of the educational debate it has been able
to support. Educational policy makers, teachers and sections of the community have begun
to wonder how much our students increasingly better performance in annual standardized
assessments can really tell us about the kinds of textual and discursive resources they need
in order to participate in the cultural landscapes and workplaces of knowledge economies;
more and more have also started voicing their dismay at the intense pressure that learning
for examination purposes puts on students, with hardly any time left for leisure engagement
with texts.
According to the local newspapers, the statistics keep painting a bleak picture: in a 1992
study, four out of five Singapore youngsters reported spending as many as three hours
studying after school, and this is on top of the extra classes that seven out of ten received
daily after the official curriculum had been delivered; when at home, many of their proactive parents tapped into the highly lucrative shadow educational system to augment their
childrens learning, with 49% of primary students receiving paid tutoring (Straits Times,
April 4, 1992)and the numbers are likely to have meanwhile gone up. Even the media
coverage of Singaporean Primary four students performance on the most recent International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) reading study had
an unfamiliar spin this year: instead of dwelling, as usual, on how well above expectations
local students, of whom only about 42% speak English at home, performed in comprehension tasks, especially in comparison with students from native English-speaking countries,
some papers gave far more publicity to the studys finer-print findings, especially those to
do with the quality of the youngsters home practices with texts (compare, for example,
the headline in The Straits Times, Singapore pupils hold their own in reading skills test
of April 9, 2003, with Todays headline of the same date, Reading, but not for fun: Study
reasons to do with Singapores colonial heritage, the status of English as the language of global capitalism, and to
bond through an ethnically neutral tongue a national mix of Chinese (77%), Malays (14.1%), Indians (7.1%) and
others (mostly Eurasians), who all speak their own vernacular. With English being the premium linguistic resource
in Singapores linguistic market, increasingly more families, usually those who fall into the higher income groups,
speak English at home (in the late 1990s, a bit more than a fifth of the population). At the same time, students are
expected to study as a separate academic subject the language associated with their ethnicity as mother tongue
second language. This bilingual policy, referred to as English-knowing bilingualism (Pakir, 1991) by local
academics, has to be seen as the outcome of the desire to have access to Western science and technology while
securing each students ethnic identity and Singapores Asianness (Ang & Stratton, 1995).
221
shows many parents not talking to kids about books). Concern was voiced that despite their
international competitiveness with respect to reading comprehension in English and their
scoring higher than most on the Index of Educational Resources at Home, Singaporean
youngsters ranked way below the international average when it came to reading for fun
outside school. Also, drawing on the dominant paradigm of good parenting, which views
parental involvement (Gregory, 2002; Gregory & Williams, 2000) through book-sharing
as responsible for childrens early educational success, it was lamented that those practices
and attitudes commonly viewed as essential in mediating childrens cognitive and literacy
development were found to be sorely missing at home: More than three quarters of Singaporean parents were found to fail to talk to their school-going children about what they
are reading and only 40% of the students who participated in the study had parents with a
positive attitude towards reading, far below the international average of 53% (Today, April
9, 2003, p. 6; see also, Mullis et al., 2003).
Ironically, despite this welcome shift in the kinds of issues that are raised about literacy
education among the public at large and academic researchers, the image of Singapore youth
and what they can do, and are doing, with texts, has remained remarkably unidimensional.
Pursuit of these issues has largely failed to provide additional layers and alternative perspectives to the view of youngsters commonly held; indeed, it has merely supplied more factual
information that is used to explain their problem, their lack, and thus has served to reinforce rather than begun to contest existing ways of seeing them. The construction of them as
examination-savvy but otherwise lackingin critical-analytical disposition, parental support and timemay also explain why measures designed to broaden their repertoire with
texts have rarely included an attempt to find out how and why they use and make sense of
texts outside school (for an exception, see Chia, 2001). After all, it is assumed that they lead
highly scheduled lives where nothing much figures besides literacy practices associated
with schooled purposes and with school-sanctioned texts, strictly reinforced at home. Even
their behaviour in spaces away from school and home, usually associated with recreation,
suggests an almost obsessive preoccupation with school matters and materials. Newcomers
to Singapore are often startled by the habits of youngsters to patronize food establishments
like Starbucks, McDonalds and others, and to turn them into study centers where groups
of them congregate for hours after school doing their homework or studying for upcoming
end-of-term examinations. The students may seek occasional relief by turning to unofficial
texts from the emergent culture (Luke, 1993) tradition, but their consumption is considered
rather mindless, if not downright harmful. Worse still, when it comes to those youngsters
whose parents do not speak and read English fluently, the commonsense assumption is
that for them after-school literacy is much less of a habit, because of families unable or
unwilling to mediate (see also, Blackledge, 2001), and that when they do read it means
working with their school texts in pedagogic ways alone or at the tuition center.2 However,
if the findings of the growing base in youth literacy research in other sites (Alvermann
et al., 1998; Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999; Finders, 1997; Hull & Schultz, 2002;
Lewis, 1998) are anything to go by, our current image of youth and their practices is in
dire need of revision. Even though they may be more strapped for time and shorter of safe
2 Most Singapore students, from as early as Primary 1, attend private or ethnic-community-run tutorial centers
several afternoons a week, where they get help with their homework and are trained in exam-taking skills.
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spaces, Singapore youth, just like their counterparts elsewhere use texts and particular literacy processes in ways that position them as powerful in certain spaces or that allow them to
claim membership in certain groups. These young people move throughout any number of
seemingly contradictory practices in a single day, bringing to and taking away from these
practices various literacy practices and various texts (Moje, 2002: 118).
3. Nature of data
The children we hear in the following were among the key informants in a series of
projects designed to investigate Singaporean youngsters use of, and attitudes towards,
print and media texts in out-of-school contexts. Conducted by two of my research students,
young Chinese primary school teachers pursuing a graduate degree at the time, between
2000 and 2002, the projects original goal was to take up the thread of gender, one of the
crosscutting variables which have been shown to influence childrens literacy learning and
attainment. The relationship between gender and literacy among youngsterswhether differences in girls and boys reading and writing preferences and habits or the relationship
between these and educational attainmenthas been relatively underresearched in Singapore. After initially surveying four classes of 10- to 12-year-olds in three Singaporean
primary schools, we elicited the bulk of the data through focus-group discussions with six
friendship groups from these classes. Since our access to the students was limited to conducting the surveys and the subsequent interviews, the friendship groups were identified
for us by the students form teachers. Whilst the three participating schools have different catchment areasone predominantly middle-class, English-speaking and the other two
predominantly lower-class, mother-tongue speakingthe students were all from the EM2,
the higher stream,3 and hence quite fluent in English.
The scope of the gender-and-literacy question is wide, with separate parts and phases
of the projects addressing different, and increasingly more specific issues. After an initial
examination of the youngsters general reading and viewing preferences, based closely
on Millards (1997) line of inquiry, a later phase invited them to talk about comics and
cartoons, especially the Japanese manga and anime type, as these, in prior large-scale
questionnair0es as well as in the focus-group interviews of the earlier phases, had emerged
as most pleasurable for them, as well as most clearly gendered (see also, Allen & Ingulsrud,
2003; Buckingham, 1993; Norton, 2003). Some of the children who had reported their
regular participation in chatgroups set up by the local childrens TV channel, Kids Central,
also allowed me access to their written conversations about their favorite programmes.
In selecting extracts from over 200 pages of transcripts, my principal aim here was to
document the heterogeneity, playfulness and critical acumen in the youngsters responses
to our queries, along with the sort of knowledge and expertise they evidence. Moreover,
given that the two projects were about one and a half years apart, coupled with the usual
volatility and short-livedness of the types of text in focus, I was also able to revisit the data
3 Examination results, especially performance in English, determine whether pupils are streamed into higher or
lower tracks. This process of streaming begins at the end of Primary 4, when pupils are placed into EM1/EM2 or
EM3 classes.
223
here with an eye towards the changes in the childrens textual preferences and pursuits,
as well as in the resources they needed to display knowledgeability in relation to them
(Moss, 2001: 150).
Of course, one cannot conclude the description of data of this kind without the usual
caveats about research that tries to establish evidence about childrens experiences and
views. Most immediately, there is the issue of the status of the youngsters talk about texts.
Rather than taking it as a mirror to what goes on in their heads, we will view it here as a form
of social action: it is used to stake out and construct identities, to establish and negotiate
interpersonal relationships, and to claim and enact social power (Buckingham, 2000: 117).
Furthermore, there is the highly ambiguous nature of the social event of the interview and
its location. In our case, the youngsters had to cope with an array of conflicting signals: The
invitation to share their private, unsanctioned after-school practices was given them by
an unfamiliar teacher-adult, positioned as the one in power, and though the interview was
set up in a space outside the classroomusually in one of the schools cozy recreational
roomit was still within the site of the school, an institution clearly perceived as public
and educational (Buckingham, 1993: 63). At the same time, especially when the topic
turned to their various media text pursuits, the youngsters were frequently positioned as
the insiders, slightly bemused or exasperated by us newcomers, who lacked their range
of experience and resources, appeared to work so hard at figuring out the sources of their
pleasure with these texts, and at times just didnt get it (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003: 32).
Last and perhaps most significantly, by objectifying the youngsters as our subjects of
study, we must also acknowledge our own position as key players in the field we have
delimited for our research (Bourdieu, 1992; Reid, 1998). The data the youngsters produced
were clearly mediated by us, through our pre-constructed concerns and carefully orchestrated questions which in many ways predetermined what we found and what we would
consider of value.4 Hence, it would be interesting to compare the data managed by us with
instances where the children talk with each other for but not to the researcher, recording
themselves as they engage in, and talk to each other about, their out-of-school literacy practice (see Reid, 1998, for an insightful discussion of methodological and epistemological
issues arising from investigations of new literacies among youngsters).
4. Out-of-school literacy as horizontal form of knowledge
Vital to a view of literacy as a set of social practices is the understanding that literacy learned in schools and other pedagogic sites and literacy of out-of-school domains are
shaped by the social contexts within which they are enactedcontexts which are markedly
different. According to Bernstein (1996, 1999), their different social contexts produce different structures of knowledge and learning, with schooled practices organized as vertical
4 For example, when one group of boys showed a great deal of reluctance to talk to us about their interest in Lets
and Goon hindsight probably because they were unable to respond to our outsider way of seeking information
and therefore keeping us at a distancewe decided to move on to another friendship group of boys which had
been suggested by the form teacher. Rather than acknowledging our own subjectivity in this instance and reading
the interview data in ways which moved beyond our original intentions, we considered the interview flawed and
the data obtained through it to have only marginal value.
224
discourse and informal, everyday ones as horizontal discourse. Bernstein chooses the terms
horizontal and vertical to capture the radically different organizational trajectories these
structures of knowledge have:
The form of knowledge usually typified as everyday, oral or commonsense knowledge has a group of features: local, segmental, context-dependent, tacit, multi-layered,
often contradictory across but not within contexts. Today the object of such knowledges is likely to be volatile and substitutable for each other. I want to call such a
discourse a horizontal discourse. I shall distinguish a horizontal discourse from a
vertical discourse. A vertical discourse takes the form of a coherent, explicit, systematically principled structure, hierarchically organized, or it takes the form of a series
of specialized languages. (pp. 170171)
What youngsters encounter in school, especially in the early years of language and
literacy instruction, is a strong and constantly monitored trajectory to literacy learning,
future-oriented, and vertically sequenced. In the context of the recent English Language
syllabus in Singapore, the subjects content is arranged into biannual attainment levels,
differentiated according to particular ability groups, with the overriding principle of spiral
progression in the various language skills (2001 English Language syllabus) increasing this
sense of verticality. By contrast, in their out-of-school interactions with texts, especially
media ones, such externally imposed and principled regulation of knowledge is absent.
Bernstein refers to literacy learning within the informal domain in terms of segmental
competence, which usually has a specific limited realization. Its function is, so to speak,
consumed in its realization (1996, p. 179).
This transient quality of segmental competence, very closely linked to changing contexts
of consumption, can be demonstrated especially well when we look at the shifting cartoon
interests of the youngsters over the one and a half years, we were in contact with them. While
during the pilot interviews with the boys in mid-2001 their preferred objects of viewing
and discussion were the Japanese action-adventure cartoons Pokemon and Digimon, and the
associated games and magazines, three months later their preoccupation had shifted to a toy
car racing series, Lets and Go, the spin-off product of a popular Japanese mini-4WD race
car, Tamiya, which had made its way into the Singapore toy market and had become the
in thing for boys to collect and to race in weekend competitions held at various shopping
malls. A year later, in our next series of interviews, however, interest in the racing show had
waned, alongside the weekend mini 4WD races. There were very few boys mentioning the
show, and even fewer admitting that they had once been avid watchers of it. Meanwhile, the
allegiance for some had shifted to adventure cartoons like X-Men Evolution and BeyBlade,
and a whole new range of intertexts and associated merchandises, and for others to the
newest installments of their favorites of old, Digimon or Pokemon, now in their fourth or
fifth series.
From our interviews with the boys, it became quickly apparent that there was no necessary
progression between the competencies that went with one kind of cartoon interest and
another, nor could we detect a set of transferable skills. In fact, often the youngsters expressed
simultaneous commitment to cartoons for which they had to muster quite divergent viewing
competencies. Perhaps the most striking case in point is a group of boys whose cartoon
addiction to Pokemon overlapped with that to Lets and Go. Initially we found it very difficult
225
to get the boys to display the kind of competence that a meaningful engagement with Lets
and Go required. From their tightlipped responses to our questions we had concluded at
firstin line with the very essentialist views about them which we were attempting to
challengethat they took our interview as an educational event, an oral cloze demanding
right and wrong answers. But we soon came to discover that their hesitancy, accompanied by
gestures of disbelief, had more to do with the inappropriacy of the questions we asked. Our
usual interrogative repertoireabout most liked characters, most exciting action features,
or style of animationwhich worked well with cartoons like Pokemon, even when asked
of the same group of boys, made it in this instance difficult for them to share their pleasure.
Expertise in relation to Lets and Go involved knowing the rules of minicar racing and
seeing who best remembers the vital statistics about the various car models, not voicing
ones likes or dislikes about the two main protagonists, the race car drivers Joey and Jet,
or getting engrossed in the weekly plotline of the show. Most importantly, for them to be
insiders of the show meant reading it didactically, as a manual for toy car modification
techniques to be applied to their own cars and thus to improve their chance to win in the
real game.
Interviewer:
J:
HW:
J:
LQ:
What is it about Lets and Go you like so much?

Because I play Tamiya sometimes and there are tracks all around Hougang and I am playing.
Yes, it teaches how to use different engines and what type of Tamiya is good for what.
Can teach us how to use the machine, the type of modification and how to put stuff at some
places like cornering and parts . . . and the type of tyres . . ..
Yes, they teach us the strategy.
On5 top of that, the boys seemed to look upon the field of Lets and Go as masculine
domain, a way of asserting group membership through sharing a specialist competence,
which we women and outsiders to their cartoon-and-racing culture were encroaching
upon with irrelevant questions. Moreover, even when they were just among their peers, the
confines of the school seemed to discourage them from displaying their expertise:
Interviewer:
LH:
Interviewer:
LH:
Interviewer:
LH:
LH, why is it so important for you to watch cartoons your friends talk about?
Because if you didnt watch, youll find that youre left out.
Would you say that you spend a lot of time in school talking about cartoons like Lets and Go?
Not really. No time to talk.
During recess time?
Recess time, hah? School must study.
The level of sophistication and technicality of their competence could thus become only
fully apparent when the boys had conversations, often competitive, among themselves or
on the internet where they often interacted with the same friends they hung out with in
school or at the mall (see also, Smith & Wilhelm, 2002). Here are a couple of their entries
on the talkback chatboard set up by the local TV station that had aired Lets and Go at the
time:
5 Most middle-age and young Singaporeans are able to lect-shift between formal and informal variants of
Singaporean English. The youngsters used a mesolectal variety of English when speaking to us. This variety is
characterized by the occasional use of pragmatic particles from Chinese (e.g. lah), the occasional omission of
articles, copula verb and third person present tense ending, as well as a far greater liberty to omit subjects and
complements when retrievable from context than in Standard English varieties.
226
Subject: Tamiya tips

I say: Use a gear ratio of 3:5:1 for straight tracks, 5:1 for technical ones. Use a smaller
tire for better acceleration and a larger one for top speed. But there is really no fastest
car, it depends on the weight, battry, motor & modifying.
Subject: Important
I say: Hey plasma dash is the fastest motor around but it takes up a lot of battery power.
For beginners, use hyper dash 2, but for intermediates, use Ultra but only experts are
recommended for plasma cause u need to know how to stabilise ur car first and at the
same time make it go fast. So regardless of what motor or battery ur using, the goal
is to have a fast and stable car.
Subject: Re: Important
I say: Good advise, B. But my modified car beats the rest!! Dont believe me? Come
down to Clementi West and see this weekend!
By contrast, the following year, when asked about the show, they showed a very different
set of competencies, this time dwelling on its fake status and using it to explain their
disengagement (see also, Moss, 2000). Not that modality judgements (Buckingham, 1993)
had been missing in their earlier talk about the cartoon, or were some recently learned
conceptual understanding; as the interview bit at the opening of this paper shows, part of
competency around Lets and Go, and cartoons in general, had from the outset meant an
acknowledgement of the lack of plausibility of their events. The boys had seemed to be
fully aware of the low modality of cartoons and their operation in the as if mode. But at
that point in time, modality talk had had a very specific function. The fact that anything
can happen in cartoons rendered their position as viewers and the act of ranking them as
their favorite legitimate and morally permissible,
HW:
But I dont think Lets and Go is good because they dont go and study and Joey stay in the
shop for three days racing his car and his mother dont care. . . . Cartoon is cartoon. Human
being is human being. Human being must go home and eat and study but cartoons never mind,
they dont eat they wont die one, they dont study they wont get scolding.
and it allowed them at the same time to concentrate on what they considered the shows
main attraction, the hands-on instructions it so freely dispensed to help them excel at their
weekend hobby. But, 15 months later characterizing the show as fake or implausible
worked differently, providing the main rationale for moving on to other media texts. Echoing
Moss data of her boys engagement with WWF Wrestling, it served to disguise the boys
once intense involvement in something which had by now come to look dubious and childish.
As she aptly characterizes their stance, they were innocent dupes of some duplicitous
process, which palmed off phoney goods as the real thing. This lets them off the hook in
relation to all they can now recall of what they used to do (Moss, 2000: 56).
The boys in our study gave the following account of the shift in their interests:
R: Show very kua zang (exaggerated)! In real life people just watch their cars zoom
around in a more or less circular track while it shows the racers running about following
their cars on the track. And they never get tired! Aiya!
227
Subject: What Lah

I say: Hello brother! All the kidcentral [local childrens TV station] show on mini
4WD r crap. Where got people chasing their mini 4WD cars and where got people
use hockey sticks to control their cars! Also theres no such thing when the cover can
stabilize air instead it is making the car more slower. U should see those PRO they
dun use covers, they juz use the empty shell to race.
Nevertheless, it is important not to confuse this newly gained scepticism, a sort of critical competency, about the constructed nature of Lets and Go and its questionable status
as a manual, which the boys display here in the informal domain, with the kind of conceptual understanding, abstractable from the current context, which we associate with formal
school learning. According to Bernstein (1996), a tell-tale sign of horizontal discourse is
that it is an outcome of a cultural specialization and its modes of acquisition and production
are embedded in that specialization (p. 170). The moment the particular configuration of
text, viewers and context disappears so do the competencies associated with it. This lack
of something akin to continuity or progression is evident from the most recently recorded
cartoon talk with some of the boys, who have shifted their commitment to BeyBlade, one of
the most popular animes at present, based on a traditional Japanese spinning top, Bei-goma,
which has become a hot childrens sport merchandise in Singapore. Rather than transferring
the lessons they learned from Lets and Go, and the unreliability of its modeling, to their
new No. 1 cartoon, the boys reasons for liking BeyBlade sound only too familiar: Viewing
it as a kind of handbook, they feel it gives them the opportunity to acquire the necessary
expertise from Tyson, the main character, as he perfects his technique to win the spinning
top world championship:
HW: I think BeyBlade is more fun [than Lets and Go]. Can teach us how to get better
at spinning tops.
Another group of them, though, have meanwhile moved on to form even newer allegiances, in this instance to cartoons like Xmen. Taking a rather jaded dej`a vu attitude,
they comment disparagingly on the phenomenon of toy-inspired textual products and its
volatility:
Subject: BeyBlade . . .?
I say: hey . . . wads the craze about Beyblade?? Is it going to be just lyk the mini
4WD? The craze is fading, and I am gonna guarantee tt beyblade craze will fade too.
Whats so great bouddit? That its about a spinning top that stops other spinning tops?
Id rather play wif spinning coins.
5. Youngsters awareness of the two discourses and their different forms of

knowledge
So far we have been shedding light on the special kind of knowledge, or literacylocal,
segmental, rapidly shiftingwhich is acquired through horizontal discourse and generated
228
in the informal domain. The youngsters interactions with us about this sort of knowledge have also provided evidence that they succeed in occasionally escaping the demands
and regulations of schooled literacy and its vertical discourse to negotiate more mundane
engagements with their favorite unsanctioned texts. To what extent would it be possible
to reinsert aspects of these in vertical discourse, in the domain of schooling? Bernstein
(1999) considers such attempts at recontextualization highly problematic, given that they
will always be mediated through the distributive rules of the school (p. 169), its pedagogic
regimen, and hence become transformed as forms of knowledge. Using the long-established
principle of building on what the students, especially the less able, bring from home, one
may want to celebrate horizontal discourse and view it as a crucial resource for pedagogic populism in the name of empowering or unsilencing voices to combat the elitism
and alleged authoritarianism of vertical discourse (p. 169). Interested in this issue, I revisited the interview data from our Singapore youngsters and began asking of it Moss
(2000: 58) questions: How would they respond to the transfer of such unsanctioned texts
into the domain of the school? Would they be aware of the different principles at work
in each context? Even though we had rarely posed such questions directly, some of the
youngsters addressed them in side comments. Their verdict seemed unanimous: One into
the other will not necessarily go (Moss, 2001: 149). The one time we inquired directly
whether they would enjoy watching Lets and Go in school, the response we were given
was:
School cannot watch Lets and Go. School also cannot play Tamiya so no point to
watch. It is a school rule not to bring 4WD to school as people consider it a toy. So
how watch?
Obviously school, they felt, even if it made the cartoon available for viewing, would not
allow them to appreciate it in its entirety and to display their competency. For them, talking
about Lets and Go meaningfully, as our own interviews had made apparent, hinged vitally
on the recognition that it was not merely a TV programme but an integrated phenomenon
of highly interactive commodities (Buckingham, 2000: 90), where no one element should
be given priority and where the intricate relationship between the cartoon, the toy cars and
the racing game had to be acknowledged.
When we talked with the girls about their favorite reading materials, they made a distinction between books and things to do with them that were suitable for school, on the one
hand, and books and activities around them outside, on the othera distinction which
some insisted held even for such practices as Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading
(USSR). Introduced into the local English curriculum with the explicit aim of crossing
that divide, USSR is to provide students with a space which welcomes their own reading resources to the school and invites them to engage with them during official lesson
time.
Interviewer:
T:
Interviewer:
J:
T:
So do you have USSR?

Yes, every Friday youre supposed to read your own stuff, and read and read and read until the
bell rings right? So uh some will bring their books from home.
So you bring your own books to read?
I dont bring any books from home.
I always bring the same book, The Twits, because its thin and light.

Interviewer:
T:
Interviewer:
T:
Interviewer:
M:
J:
M:
229
But youve read it before, so why would you want to read it again and again?
I dont really read in school like I do at home. Its very different in school. I just put it in my
bag. In school I study.
You what?
Study.
Are you allowed to use the time for studying?
I also do. One time I was learning Ting Xie (Mandarin for Spelling) right?
But must be in English. I study only English things.
Yes, I know. Most of the time I do spelling in English, and then another time I was revising for
English exam right, then prefect say cannot.
Their reaction here is not dissimilar from that of Whitty et al.s (1994) students, who
defined instances where the school subject drew on elements of horizontal discourse (e.g.
themes or texts) as nonacademic, not the stuff of serious study. In addition, Ts comment,
I dont really read in school like I do at home. Its different in school, may also indicate
her concern that the classroom context could strip her engagement with texts she cherished
elsewhere of pleasure.
In instances where books that the children considered among their favorite leisure titles had been transferred into, and adapted for, the school domain as parts of required
reading schemes, they did not fare well. Once fixed to suit the pedagogic routines of
English lessons, they seemed to lose their appeal. As Buckingham (2003) has recently
explained, the levels of intense concentration and energy that characterize [the youngsters] out-of-school engagements with popular texts are at odds with the dullness and
earnestness of mechanical teaching (p. 313) that prevails in most reading classes. In
this context, it is particularly interesting to examine the following exchange, both in
its content as well as interactional structure, when the youngsters described their reaction to Roald Dahls stories, listed as No. 1 home reading by many, when they found
them, sliced up and packaged into comprehension-size passages, in their upper primary English textbooks, and compared it to their out-of-school ways of engaging with
them
M:
J:
All:
J:
T:
Interviewer:
M:
J:
M:
E:
T:
J:
The textbooks uh the stories, ah sometimes a bit boring. Then many we also read before, like
Roald Dahl.
Yes, and also too short! They dont let us complete the whole thing.
Yah.
Yes, they leave us hanging in suspense, lead us to most exciting part of the story and then drop
it there.
They dont let us finish the story. And then have grammar items, like conjunctions.
OK, lets let M talk. Shes dying to talk.
When at home its not boring and it use all kinds of words you know like . . . I forgotten now.
And then they got different, like the characters they use all kinds of funny words like the BFG.
He keeps on muddling his English and the way he muddles it up is like Phua Chu Kangs [local
sitcom hero who has become famous for his use of local Singapore English]. So funny. I laugh
so hard when I read.
Eh eh, Charles Dickens are Dials Chickens. [Laughter in the background]
And then you know the way they talk about things, they call human beings human beans.
He keep saying am I right or left instead of am I right or wrong.
And then The Twits, theyre really dumb . . . and evil. They do disgusting things to each other.
It makes me lose my mind. How to read in school?
It makes me want to read all his books. Because its so disgusting and funny.
230
The youngsters showed an acute awareness of reading as a differentiated rather than

monolithic process. What counts as literate action with a text for school purposes, and what
can be done with it in an out-of-school setting, were perceived as markedly different, even
in cases where the focus of the reading activity, in the case above, attention to the language
of the text, might be identical. They drew a clear distinction between interactions around
text that were fun (e.g. enjoying and examining language play in Roald Dahls stories)
and those that were work (e.g. employing the Roald Dahl text, or bits thereof, as a correctgrammar inculcating device), and any attempt to appropriate what they considered fun into
the educational domain would transform it for them beyond recognition in the process.
At one point, when the interviewer asked a group of the girls how they would change
their reading lessons to make them less boring, the answers clearly indicate how difficult
it is for them to envision ways in which outside texts could be inserted into the English
curriculum which do not involve them being run over by school routines and school ways
of doing things (Moss, 2000: 59). The rather unimaginative nature of their suggestions
seems less the effect of their perception of our interview as an educational event than their
keen awareness that in the domain of the school, especially English lessons, a different
range of dispositions towards texts is called for, one that emphasizes procedural rather
than substantive engagement (Nystrand, 1997). This includes, among other things, reading
texts as objective, distant objects around which ritualized language and knowledge-telling
exercises can be set (Street & Street, 1995), or as exemplars that are supposed to teach us
about morals, manners and civic sensibility (Hunter, 1994).
Interviewer:
R:
Interviewer:
R and M:
Interviewer:
J:
E:
Interviewer:
J:
T:
How could we make the reading lessons more interesting? What about R?
Maybe the teacher could put the worksheets we do after weve read them on the computer and
then we could do them.
You prefer to do it online?
Yes, online more interesting.
Lets go on to the activity that you said you would like to do in your reading lesson. J said she
would choose a book of her own and . . . Can you tell us more about it?
Something like yue du bao gao (Mandarin for book review) like that.
Sometimes you can draw a picture and then write a summary at the bottom. It helps you draw
and makes it more interesting.
What about M? You said you would like to choose a book and write a summary of it and draw
what happened. Thats similar to what E said, right?
Because can draw very nicely. Can get A Star for it.
We can also form ourselves into group and maybe write the best about what is good about that
person and then we can, maybe at the end of the day, write all the good things about that person
and we can actually um, learn something. We can change our attitudes.
The latter sort of reading competence, to do with moral lessons to be learnt, was very often
exactly what the children sought time off from. Indeed, more than just offering respite from
studying, engagement with media texts, especially comics and cartoons, allowed them to
claim a space where authoritarian values of conformity and obedience could be undermined
and where they could claim a power and competence they did not have in real life
(Newkirk, 2001: 475). In ways reminiscent of Bakhtins notion of carnival laughter, for
many of the youngsters identification with the near-omnipotent heroes and heroines of
these texts provided the rare opportunity to imagine a version of themselves that could
mock or transgress the official world (Vinz, 1996: 17) and the role of obedient student
231
they were assigned in it. What they say in the following excerpts echoes the views of the
youngsters interviewed by Vinz (1996) and Newkirk (2001), their main reason for liking
a particular character in their favorite cartoons usually being that characters ability to
shed adult monitoring and to scoff at accepted norms and regulations. Except that for the
local children, it was the liberty these characters took to jettison the regimens of school,
examinations and homework that seemed paramount:
Interviewer:
J:
Interviewer:
All:
Interviewer:
W:
S:
W:
C:
W:
Z:
Interviewer:
SL:
LH:
SL:
LH:
SL:
What do you like about Joey [in Lets and Go]?

I like the things he do in the class. Can bring his Tamiya to school and can . . . check it in the
class and he can sometimes sleep halfway through the lesson.
So you wish you could do that like Joey?
Ya.
So what do you girls like about Sakura [in Cardcaptor Sakura]?
Can go anywhere she likes.
Ya, lor.
She got freedom.
Not like us.
When she wished it, can escape to where she wants to go.
Our parents dont let us. Little bit go out also cannot, so much homework.
So what makes a superhero cool?
Must have awesome powers.
Must have special powers, very special powers. Must have special skills to be able to fight the
bad.
Can thunder attack.
Ya. Freeze my teacher so that I dont have to do so much homework.
I wish I can thunder attack all school stuff. I can thunder shoot my mother when she scolds me
about homework . . . give out electricity.
Relatedly, engagement with locally produced comics like Mr Kiasu was sought mainly
because it allowed youngsters to contest the Standard English only discourse of schooling, at least temporarily, and instead to celebrate the local English vernacular, Singlish
(I like it because the author writes in Singlish), and the kind of cocky, street-smart,
blunt subjectivity that is usually attributed to its speakers. It seems that it was precisely
its marginalization within official circles, its dominant assessment as a social handicap,
in need of correction and eradication by schools and parents (see Kramer-Dahl, 2003),
that gave it powerful status in the literate underlife (Finders, 1997) of some of the
classrooms.
The preceding interactions illustrate two things: first, the youngsters eagerness, with the
occasional element of competition, to participate in the sort of talk around texts that would
most likely not be sanctioned in their classrooms, and second, the extent to which for them
the home space has become just as much the domain of schooled practices and regulations
as the school itself. Rather than the TV, computer games and other media preoccupations
becoming alternative pleasures which take time away from studya common theme in
many overseas studies of childrens reading preferences (e.g. Millard, 1997)what emerges
here is almost a reversal of this displacement hypothesis (Luke, 2002), with school and
its textual demands heavily infringing on the youngsters home and leisure time. This
spatio-temporal intrusion occurs not merely because the tasks assigned in school carry
over but because the parents themselves, especially middle class ones, frequently organize
additional literacy learning in the ways legitimized by the school. More often than not
232
their recommendations and purchase of books for their childrens out-of-school reading
seem to be governed by a pedagogic view of knowledge, with an eye towards improvement
in formal features of English language and literacy. According to the youngsters, their
parents chose or rejected books for them not for their storyline or suitability, but for their
quality as pedagogized objects. Though much vaguer and less linguistically informed in its
articulation, the parents discourse around books, which ones are appropriate at what age,
echoes that of the school curriculum: they are viewed as machines for learning schooled
language and are graded, in line with the developmental emphasis of vertical discourse, in
terms of the level of language competence required:
M:
Interviewer:
J and M:
Interviewer:
J:
M:
E:
Interviewer:
E:
S:
X:
L:
My mother dont want me to read.

Doesnt want you to read what?
Goosebumps.
Why not?
(Answering on Ms behalf) Because its really scary.
Because, no, not because its scary. I borrow from friend and read quietly. Its actually not
scary but funny and quite nice lah. But my mother doesnt want me to read because she say the
vocabulary not so good lah, very simple.
Harry Potter my mother introduced me to and Enid Blyton, last time I was young my mother
asked me to read. Because I can learn.
Learn about what?
Learn about vocabulary and all that. But I read because I find her books exciting.
Like you dont know . . . you cant tell what will happen next.
For Enid Blyton, my mother recommend to me too when I was very young. Words easy to
understand, so she want me to read to improve my English. Now she says too easy. Must read
other books now.
My mother buys Great Illustrated Classics for me. Because got a lot of words. She want me
to learn all these, because that time my English very um poor. First I just pretend read but then
I saw J C [a schoolmate of L] read them. He was very excited and practically read all of them
already. I start reading then also.
Nevertheless, it is significant to note that rather than passively accepting their parents
pro-educational orientation, it looks like the youngsters were able to disrupt and reconstruct
it, finding avenues to turn reading as work still into reading as fun. Though they did not
overtly contest their parents injunctions, they managed to subvert them quietly for their
own purposes at home, following up on their friends recommendations so that they could
share their pleasuresall of this, of course, in the omnipresent shadow of schooled literacy
(Moss, 2001: 156).
6. Critical-evaluative competence and the interpersonal work it is made to do

Recently, a number of studies of young reluctant readers and writers have demonstrated
how an approach to texts of the emergent tradition that appreciates their multimodal
and often densely intertextual quality can help reposition these adolescents as more capable literacy learners. Studies like those by OBrien (1998, 2001) and Newfield and
Stein (2000) have pointed to the value of a different pedagogic space where attention to
modes other than the written is sanctioned and where these are examined in the context of
the students own emotional investments. To what extent our interviewees were reluctant
233
literacy learners was difficult to tell since we did not look into the school systems classification of them as learners nor into their actual performance in classrooms. But time
and again, a mere juxtaposition of their talk around school-sanctioned print texts to that
around their preferred out-of-school texts can tell interesting stories about how much conventional school texts and reading enactments restrict students ways of articulating their
literacy. Let us listen to snippets from the interview with one of the boys groups, in a
neighbourhood school, which began hesitatingly with questions about reading in English
lessons:
Interviewer:
J:
Interviewer:
J:
Interviewer:
X:
Interviewer:
E:
J, you said you dont like doing the exercises in English lessons.
Why not? (Silence) Its Ok, you can tell us.
I get a lot of headaches.
What causes the headaches?
I get frustrated if I keep thinking for too long.
What about you, X?
The worksheets are quite boring and some of the facts are very hard.
And you, E?
Yah, I think I will get the answers correct but when I get back the work I got them wrong. Very
irritating.
Although the questions throughout were meant to offer the boys an active subject position
from which to voice their experiences and opinions, their responses were reluctant, tightlipped, unidirectional, expressing boredom, even frustration, with the rigid, print-biased
tasks in school, in relation to which they felt rather powerless. This was in stark contrast to
the engaged, animated and sustained responses we received when a bit later in the interview
the topic shifted to their after-school reading of comicsa literacy activity they felt they had
much more freedom to control, and about which they had plenty to share and co-construct
with their peers:
Interviewer:
J:
Interviewer:
J:
E:
Interviewer:
J:
X:
OK, so go ahead and tell us what you like about comics.

They can actually show you a lot of things you know, the words take a lot of very very very
very long time to explain a certain expression or uh, a certain action, a certain something that
can happen in a very short period of time. In comics they can just bring it out in pictures and
sounds. Yah.
Sounds?
Yah, speech bubbles and other things. I find Im drawn into it, I can see more what the character
is about. And the action!
Yah, the action can capture so well.
Action? The way they draw?
Yah, you know like the storybooks, they, when they describe actions, they take a long long time.
He lifted his arm and then after that the thing boom and then. Yah, every action, every move.
Yah! Thats right. They got to describe it. But then, but then here they can do it in pictures. You
just see like you know all at once.
As the boys shared their passion for comics, their aesthetic and emotional judgements
showed them to be quite sophisticated users of such texts, drawing on visual and intermedial
literacy skills which are likely to remain hidden (Finders, 1997) from their teachers. This
is because the official literacy curriculum is still slow to recognize and adapt to the demands
of the new communicative order (Street, 1998) and its complication of literate practices
and products, treating texts which draw heavily on visuals (big books and other sorts of
picturebooks) as mere entry points on the developmental trajectory to more serious pursuits
234
with texts which privilege print. Once given an opening to talk about newer, less officially
valued literacies, the youngsters were not only more forthcoming in their views but, as they
voiced them, demonstrated the ability to make comparisons across a range of texts and
genres and to illustrate more general assertions. They had lots to say about the different
affordances of the visual and verbal modes, what might be most efficiently and effectively
communicated in one mode and another, and were acutely aware of generational differences
in modal dispositions.
For instance, during the discussion of their chatroom habits, the girls explained:
T:
Interviewer:
T:
A:
I think chat room is really fun, even though the older ones at my house, my mother and my
auntie usually say you can just pick up the phone and talk. But, but they dont notice its much
more fun chatting and typing. And it actually improves your typing skills. And, and you get to
talk to more than one person at the same time, so its really great loh. And at the same time,
you can also play games on the Internet, so convenient and also you can communicate better.
You said you can communicate better. How so?
Um you, you can put emotions and its like smiley or sad face or something. Then, you can
actually type what you feel. If you pick up the phone and say, the person cant really see what
youre feeling. So its clearer that way.
And nobody can hear. Rather than talking on the phone because like talk on the phone sometimes
you may talk too loud then you know everyone will hear like that.
The childrens outside reading practices in a larger transnational discourse of comics

and cartoons (Kramsch & Lam, 1999: 66) also enabled them to compare and contrast
different national varieties. For example, their constant encounter with Japanese anime
as hybrid textual forms, at times in Chinese and at others in English translation, facilitated their critical assessment of the quality of different translations, the cultural nuances
which the different languages added, as well as subbing versus dubbing practices (e.g. M:
Sakuras English voice so loud and brash, not fitting, not at all gentle and subtle like her
character.). When the subject of the different styles of visual representations in mangas
and Western cartoons was raised, the metalinguistic quality of some of the boys comments was all the more remarkable in the light of the school curriculums failure to equip
them with an awareness of, and specialist discourse for talking about, such newer forms
of cultural production. And, rather unexpectedly for us, the boys reaction was not one of
uncritical, wholesale enthusiasm for the primacy of visuals in comics and the rapid processing it allows. Instead, they showed that they can be discriminating readers, aware of
the strengths and weaknesses of the ways visuals are employed in this genre to organize
the world they represent (see also, Hagood, Stevens, & Reinking, 2002). Whilst they were
adapt at sussing out instances where they could learn from the special design resources
that comics draw on and mine them for their own purposes, they were also acutely aware
of the constraints of the format and process of production of the genre, which often involves confusing perspective-shifting, haphazard changes in portrayal across frames, and
uneven colour quality, especially in serial mangas on recycled newsprint like Slam Dunk and
others.
Interviewer:
E:
So you like the artwork of these comics, the pictures?

Not always. The pictures are not very clear. They just draw, because in comics the pictures are
very small. And some of the pictures like if it is the same person, the look may not be the same,
its a bit different. Like if the face is first like, like a triangle, then next time you will see its a
rectangle, that kind of face.

Interviewer:
E:
X:
235
And you like that? Which comic is that?

Archie.
Not just Archie. Sometimes in Japanese one, Slam Dunk, sometimes very messy like swordfighting, they killed the, you dont know which one is who, because they all look the same and
theres no colour to differentiate who is who. But then overall, for example, Mr Kiasu or Water
Margin, when they are not fighting when they are talking, the pictures are actually quite good.
So sometimes when I do artwork, art, then I just go and copy from the comics.
Yet, as Buckingham (1993) and other studies of adolescents talk about media texts
have cautioned, and as we can see from the interactions in some of the excerpts above, we
should not assume that this critical-evaluative discourse necessarily reflects the positions
the youngsters take on in the actual activity of reading and viewing. Instead, it is vital to
recognize its function as a major resource for defining and negotiating their subjectivity in
relation to others:
The extent to which the children adopted this critical discourse depended on how
they were choosing to define the interview context and their relationship to it. Yet it
also depended on their perceptions of their own social position, and relationship with
others in the group. . . . Being critical is a social, discursive practice, not a state of
mind. (Buckingham, 1993: 293294)
This was particularly transparent among a group of middle-class girls from a single-sex
school, as the following excerpts illustrate. Of the four girls, T is probably the most complicated figure, with the reputation of an academic high-flyer. High-achieving students in
her school are usually cast as hard-working, quiet, feminine girlsa set of identity markers
which T felt uncomfortable with and tried to disrupt, especially when in the company of
J, as she was during the interview. Seeking approval by the small outsider group around
J, a strong, opinionated character, known for openly challenging the traditional notion of
femininity and the value of doing well at school, T had to work even harder at positioning
herself as different from the good, nice girls whom Js group tended to perceive her to
be part of (see also, Reay, 2001). In the context of our interview, this voicing of difference
included, significantly, her open defiance of the literacy preferences and practices associated
with these girls. The following exchange at the beginning of our focus-group discussion
shows her immediately challenging the role of the study-educated girl in which the others,
most notably J, the leader, cast her. Through I/them distancing strategies, she adamantly
denies her membership in the group of girls whose literacy behaviour (discussing about
books and being into studies) measures up to official expectations.
Interviewer:
J:
T:
J:
M:
J:
T:
Do you actually share what you have read with others?

Not really but if I do, its usually with people who are more study educated than I am like for
example T.
(Protesting loudly.) I am not study educated. Others, like C and L are. Theyre more into books,
into studies.
Yah, more into studies, Yah, studies.
Yes, theyre very smart. And C is a prefect.
The people who are more active prefer to play. (Rising from her seat.) Play! Play! Yah lah! For
example, T, right, we dont, we dont discuss about books at all.
Yah.
236
In the course of the interview, we see her becoming increasingly vocal, obviously spurred
on by the presence of J and M, seeking hard to blend in with, if not outperform, their
resistant stance. One way she does so is by asserting a strongly anti-feminine position
when discussion turns to what they perceive as girls texts. The talk around Archie comics
provides a good example:
Interviewer:
T:
J:
T:
J:
Interviewer:
T:
M:
T, what is it about Archie comics you dont like?

Um, its always about the same thing. Some, that guy falling in love with Veronica or Betty.
Its so boring, its either one of them. And then they change into their bathing suits, or not,
swimming suits and go to the beach. Then they meet a guy and stuff. Its really boring.
And its so lovey-dovey. I hate it!
Its so sick.
Always the same storyline. Love and love and love and things. (Pretends to be vomiting.)
Do you know that a lot of your classmates actually read Archie comics?
I hate them! Theyre so yukkie. (Exaggeratedly stresses the last word.)
Its so boring. But I know the kind, right, L and K and a lot of those girlie kind of people will
be reading their Archie comics.
Needless to say, to be able to voice such detailed and knowledgeable critical judgement
as T does here at the start, she has to have the kind of familiarity with the comic series that
comes only with regular consumption and probably prior pleasure. She sets the tenor of
the ensuing exchange, condemning the series for its predictable storyline and its dwelling
on romantic love interest, to which the others add on and almost outdo one another in
their show of negativity and disapproval. There is more to the girls use of these distancing
gestures than the common attempt to position themselves as more adult and experienced
in reading and life in general than others (Buckingham & Sefton-Green, 1994: 3335). For
T especially, who is usually lumped together with the regular, feminine girls, it is paramount
for her status in Js group that she establishes herself as different from them. The fact that
her expression of disdain turns most vehement (I hate them! Theyre so yukkie!) when the
interviewer discloses how popular Archie is with these other girls, suggests that her major
concern lies with ensuring that the present company she keeps does not align her with them.
The girls exchange, with its tensions and retractions, makes us also acutely aware that
all this playful, parodic talk is not innocent of power. Having to make choices of allegiance,
T can be seen employing it strategically to claim her status, albeit temporary, in a group
that usually considers her an outsider. Hence, it is important to examine any discourse
about out-of-school literacy practices the youngsters engaged in with us, critical-evaluative,
subversive-parodical or otherwise, within the interpersonal dynamics within which it was
produced and in terms of the social and political uses to which it appeared to be put. Only
then, can we appreciate the skilful, sophisticated and oftentimes seemingly contradictory
ways in which the girls and boys used it to create allegiances, marking out the boundaries
of whos in and whos out, and enabling those with less power to make their own tactical
use of those who hold more (Lewis, 1998: 119).
7. Conclusion
Over the course of these interview projects, our thinking about young peoples literacies
was challenged and changed, in many of the ways which Moje (2002) in her call for the
237
study of youth literacies predicted would happen. Not only did our interactions with the
groups of young people provide us the opportunity to learn about their use of literacy
but also from them as they teach us about how complex literacy processes and practices
develop and change in multiple contexts, times and spaces (p. 120). And beyond that, our
study of how Singaporean youngsters engage with, and talk about out-of-school texts also
immensely complicated our previously held conceptions of them as docile, a-critical and
inarticulate literacy learners.
At the same time, I am keenly aware of recent critical accounts of the turn to the
local in literacy studies, which have warned of the reification of the new great divide, that
between in-school and out-of-school, and have argued that the emphasis on the local of
out-of-school contexts may occasionally have been overdone to the point of romanticization
(Schultz & Hull, 2002: 3; see also, Street, 2003). Whilst posing the distinction has proven
useful and valid, generating a rich body of research which attests to the differences between
the literacies of the two domains, it is nonetheless timely, as Sefton-Green (2000) and Moss
(2001), among others, have insisted, to re-visit the relationship between schooled and outof-school literacy; rather than just focusing on acts of closure, we also need to uncover
the gaps and fissures (Moss, 2001: 160), by studying how youngsters manage the contact
with schooled literacy in their own lives, and how far, and to what ends they appropriate and
contest its structures (p. 157). Moss is also astutely aware of the danger of valorizing the
local domain and of putting it on equal footing with that of the school. As she points out,
there is no doubt that the emphasis New Literacy Studies (NLS) has placed on vernacular
literacies was at least in part driven by a democratic impulse, a commitment to challenge
schooled literacys privileged status and to validate other ways of doing things with texts.
Yet, however colorful the palette of local literacies we have been offered thanks to NLS
work, seeing these literacy practices on par with those of the school would be, on the one
hand, to expect more from them than they can deliver (Damon, 1990, quoted in Schultz &
Hull, 2003: 45), and, on the other, to ignore the very different social regulation of schooled
literacy, which is specific to its institutional base (Moss, 2001: 149).
Moreover, I would also like to suggest that any uncritical celebration of the local in the
case of the data under examination here is easily preempted the moment we examine what
our Singapore youngsters read and watch and what they have to say about it against the
talk of other adolescents their age reported in studies elsewhere (e.g. Buckingham, 1993;
Buckingham & Sefton-Green, 1994; Lewis, 1998). Such a comparison quickly reveals how
much of what appears local comes to them from the outside, albeit reshaped somewhat in
the Singapore context. In fact, with the exception of the Singlish-written comic Mr Kiasu,
in our questionnaire data, the youngsters did not cite a single locally produced or mothertongue media text among the five they most liked/engaged with in any of the categories.
Further, this can make apparent the extent to which these youth are worldkids, whose
experiences, especially with popular culture texts, produced mostly through multinational
corporations and disseminated across the globe, are more likely to resemble those of young
teenagers in London, San Francisco or Tokyo than those of their geographical neighbors in
the Malaysian hinterland (Luke & Carrington, 2002).
Thus, while it is vital for us as literacy teachers to learn about and from our students
different readings of and enjoyments derived from out-of-school texts, making these texts
part of the stuff of school is an endeavour fraught with complications. There is, for one
238
thing, the danger of slippage into the progressivist celebration of their own voice or, alternatively, into radical pedagogys discourse of cultural critique and political correctness
(Buckingham, 1998, 2003). Also, it is important to keep in mind Bernsteins insistence on
vertical discourses institutional and structural resistance to invasion from outside, given the
social regulation of the classroom and the organization of knowledge within it (Bernstein,
1999). If relocated into the site of schooling, especially subject English, the horizontal discourse of out-of-school knowledge is likely to become something quite different. Perhaps
most significantly, as Morgan (1998) has shown, given the predisposition of subject English
to turn everything into texts, it is likely that the literacy practices our youngsters pursue
in the everyday domain, experienced so vividly as complex processes of making, negotiation and remaking will, once inserted into the lifeworld of schooling, be treated merely as
matters of language and texts for decipherment (p. 128).
Yet at the same time, I believe there are still insights and lessons that we can take from
this study of our youngsters engagement and competencies with out-of-school texts that
we can put to work in the service of the English literacy classroom. In line with Alvermanns
(2003) recent recommendation to US teachers of middle-year students, I suggest a close
examination of the talk of Singaporean youngsters like the ones we heard above as it
helps us take stock of, and acknowledge, the significant literacy activities in which these
youngsters engage in their lives outside of school and schooled homes. It encourages us
to think about the overlaps in self-initiated textual exploration, evaluation and intermedial
readings that occur both in and out of schoolnot for the purpose of importing one into
the other, but as a means of gaining a better perspective on how allegedly docile, a-critical
youth approach texts and learning around and with texts in different contexts (Alvermann,
2003: 18).
Moreover, we need to recall that Bernstein (1999) has adamantly insisted on the strong
interdependence between contrasts, variations and relationships in the form taken by the
different knowledges and their wider social contexts of production, transmission, acquisition and change (p. 170). With the profound technocultural innovations and communicative
shifts of new times, knowledge structures and the institutions that regulate them are being
transformed. In schools in general, and subject English in particular, traditionally rarely
ever porous domains, these changes are beginning to have deep effects on how curriculum, literacy and social relations around learning are realized (Kress, Jewitt, & Tsatsarelis,
2000). Given the kinds of realignments and blurring of boundaries we have witnessed between modes of representation and between lifeworlds that used to be firmly apart, and
the consequences this has had on young peoples dispositions and identities, there is good
reason to expect a similar process of redrawing or weakening of the sharp borders between
vertical and horizontal discourse and their knowledge structures. For literary teachers not to
attend to the complex technologically and symbolically mediated textual worlds into which
youngsters are immersed and how they structure their experience, knowledge, identities
and social relations would be politically and pedagogically irresponsible (Luke, 2003:
198). Educational systems need to be open to change and stop carrying on as usual, with
curricula that are outdated, disconnected, and dangerously oblivious to the potential and
needs of its young learners. Bringing about significant change would inevitably mean a
re-envisioning of literacy education with a far more nuanced and expanded notion of what
counts as knowledge, skills and competences around texts.
239
Acknowledgements
This paper would not have been possible without my graduate research students, Lim
Lee Eng and Seah Hui Ling, who collected the bulk of the data presented here, albeit with
a different research focus. I am deeply grateful to them for allowing me to re-visit the data,
and assume full responsibility for the analysis presented and conclusions drawn here and
for any flaws therein.
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Constructing Adolescents Differently: On The Value of Listening To Singapore Youngsters Talking Popular Culture Texts

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Constructing adolescents differently: On the value of

Tel.: +65 67903434; fax: +65 896 9149.

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So you like that about Lets and Go?

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it tends to mobilize constructions of youth as narrowly achievement-oriented, exam-smart

2. Background: public and academic discourses about Singapore literacy

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What is it about Lets and Go you like so much?

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Subject: Tamiya tips

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Subject: What Lah

5. Youngsters awareness of the two discourses and their different forms of

A. Kramer-Dahl / Linguistics and Education 15 (2005) 217241

So do you have USSR?

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The youngsters showed an acute awareness of reading as a differentiated rather than

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What do you like about Joey [in Lets and Go]?

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My mother dont want me to read.

6. Critical-evaluative competence and the interpersonal work it is made to do

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OK, so go ahead and tell us what you like about comics.

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The childrens outside reading practices in a larger transnational discourse of comics

So you like the artwork of these comics, the pictures?

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And you like that? Which comic is that?

Do you actually share what you have read with others?

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T, what is it about Archie comics you dont like?

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