English in Singapore and Malaysia 17
surprisingly was much reduced and primarily ceremonial, even though
it continued to be recognized officially as Singapore’s national language.
Upon gaining independence, Singapore set its sight on ensuring its
economic survival through rapid industrialization. Not surprisingly, the
importance of English continued to be emphasized, despite the fact that
British colonial rule was over. English was seen as an essential means of
opening access to the large wealthy markets of the West — both in terms
of gaining market access as well as being able to develop a workforce
that could avail itself of the advances in Western science and technology
necessary for the industrialization of its economy. Complementing the
instrumental role of English, the representative mother tongues of the
three main ethnic groups — the Chinese, Malay and Indians — were
contrastively constructed in the political discourse as cultural ballasts
needed to ground Singaporeans in tradition and culture, to stave off
“deculturalization” (Goh et al. 1979, pp. 1–5), and thus fend off the
corrupting influences of the West (Hill and Lian 1995). English, in contrast,
was constructed essentially as abstracted from culture, i.e., in a manner,
“cultureless”, effected through a representation of English as a working
language, purposefully delinked from any association with any of the
ethnic groups. English was also reconstructed and re-presented as an
“international” language of trade, science and commerce which enabled
the government to justify the adoption of English for pragmatic reasons
without the attendant association of English with its colonial past (Ho
and Alsagoff 1998). Interestingly, the decoupling of English from any
ethnic group also meant that English was seen as the ideal language
for nation-building in yet another important aspect: its “neutrality” and
established role as an inter-ethnic lingua franca (Kuo 1980) made it the
perfect language to adopt for government administration because it ensured
equal employment and educational opportunities for all ethnic groups.
This conveniently aligned with the government’s ideological stand of
equality among races and among languages — English thus became the
key to an economically oriented language-in-education policy that would
also ensure cultural pluralism and ethnic equality.
Such narratives that justified the centrality of English in nation-building
aligned well with Singapore’s English-knowing though bilingual education
policy (Kachru 1983; Pakir 1997) that clearly privileged English over
the other languages. In Singapore, then and now, bilingual education is
understood not simply as education in any two official languages, but as the