Singapore is an ethnically diverse society, and the Singaporean state has enacted policies to promote its multiethnic character. For example, Singapore's three major ethnic groups each have an officially designated mother tongue, which may or may not be the actual home language of a given individual; the Indian “official mother tongue” is Tamil, even for speakers of Gujarati or Hindi. Students are expected to learn this language in addition to English, which is the language of business, government, and interethnic communication generally. Policies such as this one represent assumptions about how language is connected to ethnic and national identity; in this book, the authors investigate the way these assumptions play out in the lives of Singaporean adolescents. Focusing on the way these young people speak, read, learn, and mix languages in a variety of social settings, including the home, school, and peer group, the authors highlight the dynamic, reflexive, multilingual practices of their informants, contrasting them with national language and education policies that view languages as discrete entities, unproblematically related to ethnicity.

The first chapter introduces the various strands that are taken up later in the book, including multilingualism and language policy in Singapore, the importance of the perspective offered by adolescent language learners on issues of language and identity, and the aspects of poststructural social theory that provide the analytical framework. Ch. 2 gives detailed background on multilingualism in Singaporean society, outlining how language, ethnicity, and social class are linked in everyday life as well as in policies and campaigns conducted by the state. In Ch. 3, the authors explore the theoretical background to their analysis, involving frameworks such as the Bourdieusian marketplace and habitus, critical reflexivity, and the expression of identity through style and performance. Ch. 4 presents the ethnographic interview methodology used to elicit reflections on language, literacy, and identity from their informants, six Singaporean adolescents of mixed ethnicity and gender. Interview data and analysis are presented next, addressing the relationship between home, school, and peer-group settings (Chs. 5–7). In conclusion, the authors give their recommendations for pedagogical practices that account for the realities of adolescents' identity work (Ch. 8) and for state-level language policy decisions that more realistically reflect the connections between identity, language use, and social practice in Singaporean society (Ch. 9).

The most important observation of this study is that students' anxiety in the language classroom does not stem exclusively from a performance-based fear of making mistakes. The authors propose the additional construct of identity-based anxiety, “where an individual may be more concerned with maintaining his or her relationship with particular groups than with his or her language abilities” (181), such as a student who chooses to give wrong answers to save face with classmates. A few pedagogical ideas are proposed, but the development of classroom practices to mitigate identity-based anxiety remains as a direction for future research. Beyond the classroom, the authors propose that language policy should be reconsidered in a more democratic way that accounts for the sociolinguistic reality.