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programme advocates international awareness. International awareness allows students to transgress geographical boundaries and display intercultural understanding.

Benefits of LangLit.In a general sense, the findings do echo the viability of the

subject where students reported that they enjoyed LangLit as a discipline not only because of its applicability to the real world but that blended learning, in terms of online activities, afforded them with hands-on opportunities, thus, contributing to a richer understanding of the subject. For example, students reflected that they found the language component as more relatable to real life. After all, the analysis of texts, even if they were non-local, were texts that they could relate to in their daily life (e.g. newspapers, advertisements, speeches, etc.). This, thus, fulfils one of the aims of the subject which encourages students to “see and understand the world in which [they] live” (ibo, 2013b). Unsurprisingly, the LangLit curriculum was generally well received by the students. Almost 85% of the cohort take LangLit because they felt that the subject had real life relevancy. Furthermore, the curriculum advocates internationalisation and independent learners. However, a closer examination of the findings reveals contradictory observations. Firstly, the IB argues that the IBDP is an internationalised transboundary programme, yet the LangLit syllabus is rather Eurocentric. Secondly, though the programme touts to train students to be independent learners, students struggled considerably with the Eurocentric texts in the literature component, thus, requiring constant handholding and dependency on didactic teaching.

Eurocentric.Yet, the issue does not lie with the use of Eurocentric texts such

as The Great Gatsby by American author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Outsider by French author, Albert Camus, or even Macbeth by William Shakespeare, in their literature component. Given the sociocultural make-up of Singapore, students were not exactly alienated from Western culture. In fact, most of them, having learnt English as the first language from the time of formal schooling, have been inundated with Western

culture. As Hayden and Wong (1997) observe, international-mindedness may not necessarily be an experience of school or curriculum but a student’s personal experiences. As Haywood (2007) cautions, international-mindedness is “multifaceted” (p. 81) and perforated with complexities. Additionally, this also draws attention to the complications that riddle the international-mindedness of the IBDP and as Starr (2009) cautions, students may be caught between “their own cultural references and traditions and those of the Euro-American education they seek” (p. 120). In fact, most of these students struggled with the reading of The Great Gatsby at the beginning of the year. They were unable to relate to both the language and context set in 1920s America and required extensive handholding (e.g. line-by-line annotation of the initial chapters). Whilst one may argue that the problem could be one where the literary text is taken from the Western canon (Bent, 2009; Fox, 1985; Loh, 2012; Poonoosamy, 2010), the issue was not wholly that it was an Eurocentric text and students’ lack of cultural understanding of the American context, but rather that the writing style of the novel was one from the previous century.

Thus, though students did experience initial difficulty in terms of deconstructing a literary text, the problem was not one where there was a disconnection with Western culture or even the English language but one of content area. In fact, once the ‘mystics’ and chore in reading each text was unveiled for the students, they tended to “like” and “enjoy” them, thus, contradicting in some ways, the expectations of being an independent learner.

International-Mindedness. What was also problematic was students’ ability to transfer the literary skills learnt in the deconstruction of one text to another. Often the line-by-line annotation had to be repeated in each of the new texts. This resulted in a heavier reliance on authorial sources such as didactic teaching lectures and notes to guide them through the texts, thus, begetting the question on the possibility of students becoming independent learners in the literature component. Nonetheless, as Loh (2012) advises, students need to be “equipped with intercultural capital and learn how to make critical connections between the local and the global from their situatedness within the nation and the world” (Loh, 2012, p. 232). What this distils

down to is the vital role a teacher plays in ensuring that both international-mindedness and independent learning are carefully curated for the students. After all, international-mindedness cannot be taught by following a text list or listing of topics. Furthermore, the lack of clarity in guidelines provided by IB (see Cause, 2011; Hayden & Wong, 1997; Haywood, 2007; Starr, 2009) and the notion of independent learning would also need considerable time. Yet, the design of the IBDP curriculum is complex and has a short, almost two years, stipulated timeline. Consequently, this has wider implications in terms of purposeful teaching and execution within the classroom whilst negotiating with the cumbersome examination machinery.

Thus, the contradiction that arises from the curriculum can be seen in two ways. Firstly, the IBDP Eurocentric curriculum and lack of clarity in their guidelines to the definition of international-mindedness in the curriculum may result in a rather superficial treatment of international mindedness. Secondly, whilst one of the curriculum objectives was to encourage independent learning, this could prove to be challenging given an academic-performativity educational setting.

6.3.3 Contradiction: Centralised Decentralisation of the Singapore Education