‘Oh No, The Poem is in Malay’: Examining Student Responses to Linguistic Diversity in Two Multicultural Asian Classrooms

Hitherto, student responses to ethically oriented pedagogies in Literature classrooms have rarely been studied in non-western, multicultural contexts, and often assume monolingual text selections in English. As an Outer Circle English-using society, Singapore presents a multicultural Asian context worth studying where students connect aesthetic analysis with ethical issues. In this paper, I extend theorisations of ethical criticism concerned with constructing ethical meaning to interpretive discourse in classroom settings. I draw upon Derek Attridge’s notion of responsible readings to examine students’ responses to linguistic diversity in two multicultural Asian Secondary Four (Grade 10 equivalent) Literature classes from a co-designed unit on race and identity in Singapore in a larger study. Focusing on their translingual dispositions, I analyse how students express receptive and resistant responses in comparing three English translations of the Malay poem ‘Di Tengah Alam’ by Hadijah Rahmat, when minority-race students are linguistically privileged and majority-race students are linguistically disadvantaged.