‘I Don’t Speak Singlish’ – Linguistic Chutzpah and Denial in the ELT Classroom

Abstract

In Singapore, dominant narratives of Singlish as ‘bad English’ and an impediment to acquiring the Standard co-exist with discourses about Singlish as a marker of Singaporean identity. One consequence of such competing discourses has been characterised as a polarity between linguistic anxiety about Singaporeans’ proficiency in Standard English on the one hand, and rationalised confidence in using both registers appropriately on the other [that Wee (2014) terms ‘linguistic chutzpah’]. This paper examines a third phenomenon that is neither exclusively anxiety nor chutzpah in a specific site where metapragmatic evaluations of Englishes abound – the ELT classroom. Drawing on data from a bidialectal programme of Standard English and Singlish in a secondary school, I observe that while some students portrayed confidence in reasoning how Singlish might be appropriate in certain contexts, there are also instances where the same student might deny being a user of Singlish. Such denial may not be construed as anxiety, but a reflection of the unequal values of Englishes in wider society, even when bidialectalism may be promoted in the classroom. Keywords: Singlish, Singapore, English Language Teaching, TESOL, Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics