A workshop on creole writing in education and literature was held at the conference of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics in Amsterdam in June, 1993. Two of the papers discussed pidgins and creoles in education.

Peter Roberts (University of the West Indies – Barbados) presented a paper entitled “Affective factors in the use of creole in the classroom: the resolution of a paradox”. This paper points out that it is often impracticable to carry out the UNESCO resolutions that children’s mother tongue should be used for teaching literacy in formal education. This is especially true in Creole-speaking countries where the use of the creoles as the language of education is prevented by political and economic factors, persisting negative attitudes toward creole languages, and the desire to learn the international language of the former colonial power, as a key to entry into the middle class. The paper outlines other difficulties as well with regard to using creoles in education, including lack of standardization and lack of trained teachers. Nevertheless, the paper notes that creole languages have always been used unofficially in the classroom by teachers to explain things to students, but never as an end in itself.

The paper goes on to advocate an “integra-tive approach” to the use of creoles in the classroom, making the following proposals:

• use of creole in the classroom to promote confidence and understanding
• allowing for the emergence of ‘norms’ in the creole though written literature and public discussions
• providing teachers with knowledge of the creole and techniques of teaching in a quasi-bilingual situation
• production of folk literature in the ‘original’ or ‘natural’ variety of language
• promotion of creative work in the creole inside and outside the school system to which meaningful (achievement, status, money) reward is given…

This editor’s paper “Pidgins and creoles in education: an update” presented findings made since the paper presented at the 1989 conference (see “Publications”) about the use of pidgin and creole languages in formal education systems. It covered three aspects: programs using a pidgin or creole as the medium of instruction, “awareness” pro-grams using aspects of pidgins or creoles as topics of study, and evaluations of programs of both types. The languages covered included Melanesian Pidgin and varieties of creole spoken in the Caribbean and by immigrants in North America. Findings were as follows: (1) there is increasing use of pidgins and creoles in formal education, (2) studies show that the use of pidgins and creoles to teach literacy has no negative effect on the subsequent acquisition of the standard form of the lexifier language, and (3) positive effects are greater feasibility of education programs as well as increased motivation, cultural pride, and sense of self-esteem.

At the First International Conference on Oceanic Linguistics, held in Port Vila, Vanuatu, in July 1993, Heather Lotherington-Woloszyn (University of the South Pacific) gave a paper entitled: “Starting from somewhere: entering school-based literacy through Pidgin”. Part of the abstract is as follows:

This paper argues that children in the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu are working at a remediable disadvantage in attempting to achieve school-based literacy through the medium of English, which, as a colonially introduced language, is used primarily for official, administrative purposes outside the school environment and has little currency in community level discourse, where emergent literacy begins. The paper argues that a vernacular literacy bilingual education program, using Pidgin to introduce initial literacy where it is impracticable to use the vernacular, would promote language development and facilitate literacy acquisition for children of multilingual backgrounds by ensuring that early primary school learning is not discontinuous with community learning.