Cultural capital, habitus and reading futures: middle-class adolescent students’ cultivation of reading dispositions in Singapore

Abstract

The acquisition of cultural capital can only be understood in the light of the formation of habitus, including the socialisation process, and in the context of the field in which any such capital has value. Yet, the relation between cultural capital and habitus is seldom discussed in research. Drawing on the data from focus groups with 96 students and a survey of 5,779 students from six Singapore secondary schools, we analyze how reading as a form of cultural capital is distributed among High-SES, Mid-SES and Low-SES students in Singapore. We show how middle-class practices of intensive immersion in school-valued reading practices is a form of habitus that prepare some students better than others for engaged reading. The findings highlight how reading as a form of cultural capital is operationalized through students’ familial habitus and argues that making visible familial habitus provides insights for transforming institutional habitus for students’ reading futures.

Keywords:

• Habitus
• reading practices
• socioeconomic status
• cultural capital
• adolescents

Acknowledgements

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Singapore MOE or NIE. Approval for the research was obtained from the Institutional Review Board of the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore for the collection of the survey, focus group and observation data [IRB2016-09-021]. Pseudonymns are used in the coding process and in this article to protect participants’ confidentiality. Many thanks to Agnes Paculdar and Wan Zhong Hao for assisting with the administering of the data and Professor Hu Guangwei for reading the paper and providing helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

The streaming system will be abolished by 2024 (Chia, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) under the Education Research Funding Programme (OER5/16 LCE Building a Reading Culture) and administered by the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Office of Education Research.