Literacy Practices of Tamil Youth in Singapore by E. Vidtheya, Anitha Devi Pillai
This study analyses the literacy skills of Singapore youth in Tamil and their experiences with literacy. Despite Tamil being one of the four official languages in Singapore, the community is documented to be experiencing language shift (Gopinathan, Lakshmi, & Saravanan, 2019). It is therefore important to understand the factors that influence the acquisition of literacy practices at various stages of one’s life. To do so the study adopts Barton’s (2007) ecological framework of analysing reading and writing skills through three stages: home (emergent), school and youth and if youth literacy practices were influenced by emergent and school literacy practices. Interviews were conducted with ten Tamil youth between 21-30 years of age from varied backgrounds to understand their language learning experiences at the three different stages. This study reveals that the literacy practices of youth are influenced by home support, religious practices and parents’ attitude towards the language more than school practices. The finding of this study can inform researchers in the field of language maintenance and shift studies to use Barton’s framework of literacies as an additional methodology.
Keywords: Emergent literacy practices, School literacy practices, Youth literacy practices, Tamil language education