THE IMPACT OF TOK PISIN AND LOCAL VERNACULARS ON CHILDREN'S LEARNING IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of a recent study which investigated the use of Tok Pisin and local vernaculars in Papua New Guinea’s education system. Tok Pisin, an English lexifier pidgin (Siegel, 1977), was introduced in the mid 1990’s alongside vernaculars to help bridge to English at a later stage. This led to on-going public debates on their significance and appropriateness in schools. The purpose of initial education in Tok Pisin and vernaculars is to establish strong cultural bonding between children and their community (Waiko, 2003) thus enabling students to use what is already known to learn new skills such as reading, writing and numeracy in familiar contexts, enhances active interaction and communication in school from the first day, and enables students at a later time to use their abilities to learn a foreign language and to gradually transition to education in that language when they are ready. I first provide a brief synthesis of the literature that emphasizes the need for pidgins and vernaculars in schools. I then discuss the significance of these languages in transitional bilingual programs in PNG then put forward an argument that there is a need to understand fully both the continuity and discontinuity of these mediums when bridging to English. Finally, I discuss the findings which include a wide range of factors that influence the way Papua New Guineans perceive these languages and the mismatch in policy and practice which call for a possible review of the current language education policy and practices.

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