Style, Identity and Literacy

Style, Identity and Literacy is a remarkable achievement: it brings together the close analysis of the ethnography of communication with a broader political economy of literacy based on Bourdieu's models of capital and exchange.

* Allan Luke, Queensland University of Technology, Australia *

This book is unique in its consideration of language issues in Singapore in the way that it invites us to think about how multilingual complexities are reshaping debates and concerns with language both here and elsewhere in the globalised world. It is an absorbing and theoretically informed account and offers an important model of how sociolinguistic research might be done in other multilingual contexts. It concludes with a carefully-made call for a revised approach to language policy and will hopefully provoke much interest and debate, in Singapore and elsewhere.

* Mastin Prinsloo, University of Cape Town, South Africa *

“Style, Identity and Literacy” represents an accomplished and well-written example of qualitative ethnographic methods applied to sociolinguistic research, which might be of interest to anyone teaching research methodologies or pursuing qualitative research. It also contributes to the understanding of “style” as a significant factor in literacy practices and linguistic identity.

* Carolina I. Viera, University of California-Davis, USA on the Linguist List 23.3361 *

The material is thought provoking and interesting, and it raises some profound issues that should be considered by language planners. Indeed, many readers from Singapore and elsewhere will find the book both interesting and important.

-- David Deterding, University of Brunei Darussalam, Brunei in World Englishes, Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 551–563,