Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

246 Part 3: Language and Variation
six years of Primary School. Although exact fi gures are not available, many
communities, especially in urban areas, have chosen Tok Pisin (the PNG
dialect of Melanesian Pidgin) for their schools (Ray, 1996). Also, at least in
one rural area, in the Sepik Province, there are at least 26 Elementary
Schools using Tok Pisin (Wiruk, 2000).
P/Cs in bilingual (and trilingual) programmes
There are some other, less widespread, examples of the use of P/Cs to
teach initial literacy in formal education – again, transitional programmes
in the fi rst few years of primary school.
In Australia, a bilingual programme with Northern Territory Kriol and
English began at Barunga School in 1977. It was among other bilingual
programmes run by the Northern Territory Department of Education,
involving Aboriginal languages. Unfortunately, however, this bilingual
programme, along with others, was terminated by the Territory government
at the end of 1998. Also in Australia, the Home Languages Project
began in 1995 at Injinoo School in north Queensland with a variety of
Torres Strait Creole (Turner, 1997).
In the Caribbean, an experimental ‘trilingual’ programme using Islander
English (or Creole), English and Spanish was started on San Andres Island,
Colombia, in 1999 (Morren, 2001). On the island of Guadeloupe, there is
an experimental (non-governmental) elementary school using the local
French-lexifi ed creole, Gwadloupéan (Faure, 2000). There are also other
experiments involving teaching Gwadloupéan as a subject to older students
in junior and senior high schools. (For a history of other educational
efforts using Gwadloupéan, see Schnepel, 2004.)
In Jamaica, a Bilingual Education Project was approved by the government
and implemented in 2004 in two pilot schools (Devonish & Carpenter,
2007). This was a consequence of the recent changes in attitudes towards
the use of Jamaican Creole in formal domains, as mentioned above.
Finally, in the United States there have been bilingual programmes in
Massachusetts, New York and Florida for immigrants speaking HC
(Zéphir, 1997) and Cape Verde Creole (Gonsalves, 1996). In Massachusetts,
however, the bilingual education law was overturned by voters and
scrapped by the state government in 2003 (de Jong-Lambert, 2003).
Evaluative research
Only a few studies have been done to evaluate the use of P/Cs to teach
literacy. One of the earliest and most thorough was done in Australia by
Murtagh (1982) on the use of Kriol in the bilingual programme at Barunga,
mentioned above. Murtagh compared several measures of oral language
profi ciency in Kriol and English of students in the fi rst three grades at two
different schools: the Kriol/English bilingual school at Barunga and an
English-only school at Beswick Reserve, where the children are also Kriol
speakers. The overall results were that students at the bilingual school