Literacy and Language in East Asia

• Acknowledgements.- Introduction.- What is literacy and why is it important?.- High Stakes Testing, Literacy Wars, Globalisation and Asia.- League Tables and the Politics of Ranking.- Global Testing: PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS.- International Testing: The Global Education Space Race?.- Schooling, national development and growth in Asia.- The “East Asian Miracle” economies, inequalities and schooling.- Literacy and workforce capabilities.- The New Dynamic and shifting approaches literacy and language in East Asia.

"It is a fresh and original piece of work and particularly insightful in terms of regarding the approaches of literacy including policy in education as being connected in some ways as well as disconnected to a series of interrelated dynamics and perspectives that are located beyond the classroom, beyond schools and are wider than the school systems. These approaches and policies are about the reform of the social conditions and economic arrangements that characterise the experience of people in parts of East Asia. It is this challenge to create the conditions for wider changes at a societal level that comprises the discussion in the final chapter in this book. The problematisation of the autonomous model of literacy underpinning the dominant privileging of international type testing and comparision has been well deconstructed in relation to the East Asian context."- Yew Lie Koo, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia