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Singlish -- "the name given to the colloquial variety of English spoken in Singapore" [Wee, Lionel. 2014. "Linguistic Chutzpah and the Speak Good Singlish Movement." "World Englishes" 33 (1): 85-99], incorporating Chinese dialect (particularly Hokkien) and Malay lexical and grammatical elements -- has for some time been the antagonist in a cultural war of linguistic prescription (which has also targeted Chinese dialects) waged by the government. Some scholars have pointed out that apart from contestations about grammaticality and "brokenness", Singlish is also the site of contestation about identity politics in a post-colonial national setting. In more recent years, with the rise of discourses in social media critical of some government policies, as well as the increasing contestation of Singaporean identity in a transnational era, Singlish has increasingly been mobilised to mount a more grim note of sociopolitical discontent. This role is reinforced by Singlish's status as a creole of "the body", an affective discourse of visceral responses that thus defines an entrenched and conservative local community and identity.

This paper addresses how different media production teams negotiate the use of their minority languages in their practice. After a brief discussion of the concepts of language and description of a linguistic minority, a short review of similar research in the area of Minority Language Media is presented. Within this area, radio producers from three linguistic and ethnic minorities in Colombia--Wayuu, Nasa and Creole--and four television and multimedia producers from the Welsh-speaking minority in Wales are taken as examples of negotiations of identity that take place in multilingual settings. The information gathered comes from interviews and participant observation of production practices. The research shows that the groups express their multi-layered identity and how they struggle to maintain the language and culture, simultaneously upholding professionalism and contesting negative stereotypes.

The large-scale continuous migration of speakers from the Anglophone Caribbean to the United States over the past 2 decades has led to an influx of school children who are native speakers of English-lexified Creoles (ELCs). These are oral languages which do not generally occur in formal institutional domains requiring academic registers. Thus, ELCs do not depend as heavily on relative clauses as Standard English does in order to create compact and dense text. However, as children acquire Standard English in the educational system so comes the demand to acquire discourse that relies heavily on relative clauses. The study found that the creole continuum and serial verbs were associated with challenges that child speakers of ELCs exhibited as they processed subject relative clauses.

This article describes a STEAM lesson focusing on Johnathon Green's landscapes and the science of the ecosystems in the coastal region of the southeastern United States. The learning that took place manifested into something more meaningful than just the intended lesson. The collateral learning included the fact that artists can be African American, art can teach us about ecosystems, enslaved people were smart and had special skills and knowledge, and art is a viable way to make a living. Beyond this lesson, research demonstrates that children do not just "do art"; they "employ aesthetic processes to examine, uncover, and voice new, more complex knowledge". Children can find much more meaning to learning when they can make a connection to their own lives. They are more likely to have continuing conversations and pursue knowledge through curiosity as intrinsic motivation. Therefore, it is up to the teacher to bring social justice to their classroom to give all children the opportunity to view themselves as artists.

Linguists use the concept of "diglossia" to describe any sociolinguistic situation where a low-prestige dialect coexists with a high-prestige one and these dialects are used in different social spheres. Recent observations on Reunion Island have challenged this view because people mix French and Creole extensively in the same utterance and even in the same word. Prudent accounted for the flexibility of these intermediate linguistic forms through the concept of "interlect". Children are exposed at an early age to such intermediate mixed forms and in an earlier study the author suggested five language profiles for young children's use of mixing. The current study surveyed 110 five-year-old children on Reunion Island to further validate these profiles. The data analysis focuses on one variable, verb forms, which allow the identification of three production types: French, Creole and interlectal forms. Based on these data a language profile for each participant was identified. The children varied in their use of Creole and French, with the largest group of children being Creole "asymmetric", whereby their speech was dominated by Creole but also included a significant amount of French. The majority of children aged 5 speak little or minimal French.

This article reports on an applied ethnomusicological and historical study that guided the development of a new music curriculum for schools in Guyana, a multi-ethnic and postcolonial nation in Latin America. We establish our rationale with an introduction to Guyana and the status quo of its school music education, then embark on examining the socio-historical background: from Indigenous Peoples and the European settlement of colonial Guyana, to the arrival of Africans as slaves, and indentured servants from Portugal, China and East India. The diverse heritage of post-colonial Guyana, including distinctive creolization, is reviewed as a prelude to discussion of local music traditions and their representation in schools. The curriculum's framework envisages diverse performances that re-connect choir and audience with local, national, and global cultural heritage. Our outcomes arguably engender improvements to music education within Guyana, and potentially offer insights relevant to music curriculum development in other postcolonial nations.

The transgressive use of language by out-group speakers, or crossing is used in a variety of ways to achieve both affiliative and disaffiliative ends among youths. However, crossing can also be used as an affiliative resource in asymmetrical power relations between teachers and students. Reporting on the findings of a 1.5 year ethnography of an English/language arts classroom at a multilingual and multiethnic public middle school in Hawai'i, this paper explores one teacher's use of stylization practices which take the form of crossing. The teacher stylizes students' voices through ventriloquizing, which is an affiliative resource when strategically embedded in ritual oppositional frames of interaction. However, when embedded in other interactional frames, this transgressive use of language results in acts of insult or mocking. I analyze audio recordings of naturally occurring interaction to explore how Hawai'i Creole (or Pidgin) is used transgressively in reported speech by the teacher, an "out-group" individual, for negotiating interactions in his English language arts classroom. Instances of transgressive language emerge as artfully performed strategies that provide a rich site for the construction of affiliative identities. The use of crossing allows the teacher to take liminal stances between offense and respect to strategically manage student participation in this diverse classroom. These findings point to the important role that crossing plays in acts of identity through reported speech where the performance of crossing within positively valued, jocular oppositional classroom rituals demonstrates the capacity for crossing as a contributing factor to the emergence of a shared sense of community in the classroom.

In the early 1990s, the government of Papua New Guinea (PNG) enacted educational reform. It officially abandoned its English-only policy at elementary school level, in favour of community languages. In response, the Kairak community of East New Britain Province developed a vernacular literacy programme. This paper, based on original fieldwork research in PNG, assesses the viability of Kairak vernacular literacy in the context of the community's broader literacy practices. While mother tongue literacy is generally regarded by linguists and policy-makers as the best-case scenario, it can pose a variety of practical challenges in the classroom. This paper examines the community's micro-planning processes and cautions that the agents of micro planning must be wary of applying, wholesale, the policies of neighbouring communities to their own situation ("copycat" language planning (LP)). It also discusses the influence that language ideologies (vis-à-vis the vernacular, Tok Pisin, and English) have on LP. The paper concludes by recommending that in rural elementary schools with mixed linguistic populations, PNG's (northern) lingua franca, Tok Pisin, may in fact be a more sensible choice for the teaching of initial literacy.

In Mauritius, Kreol is the home language of the majority of school children, while English is the main language of literacy and the main written medium of instruction as from the first year of primary schooling. This has had a backwash effect on the preschool sector, where English is introduced. A cross-sectional study of local preschools revealed that while English number names are systematically taught, there is less planning in the teaching of general English vocabulary. This article reports on a comparative study of a "regular" English preschool class and an Oral English Intervention Programme in two local preschools over 2005. The comparison between pre-test and post-test results showed that the children in both programmes improved significantly in receptive English vocabulary, with the experimental subjects unsurprisingly outperforming the 'regular' group. However, the implementation of the intervention programme revealed the many potential challenges of teaching English to pre-schoolers in an English-poor environment.

Starting with the writer's own experience as a reader, this article discusses poetry by Eric Roach, Derek Walcott, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Edward Baugh, Michael Smith and Velma Pollard. It explores the sense of place felt by writer and reader, going on to analyse the poets' use of Nation Language, poetic metre and intertextuality in order to create distinctive and authoritative poetic voices. The relationship with the oral tradition and performance is also considered, as is the effect these voices have on a non-Caribbean reader encountering the poems for the first time. The article goes on to present the responses of a class of Year 8 students (12-13-year-olds) who were also reading the poems for the first time, evaluating the extent to which they had moved beyond a tourist's engagement with the poetry through their study of language, context and performance. Lastly, the article argues for an approach to poetry teaching that recognises the fundamental importance of performance and voice in appreciating Caribbean poetry and considers whether this is possible within the new National Curriculum.

For many students, coming to learn mathematics is as much about the pedagogical relay through which concepts are conveyed as it is about the mathematics per se. This relay comprises social, cultural and linguistic norms as well as the mathematical discourse. In this study, I outline the practices of one remote school and how the teaching practices scaffold Indigenous learners whose home language is different from the language of instruction (Standard Australian English) as they come to learn mathematics. Through various strategies, teachers have created positive learning environments that celebrate the home languages of the students while supporting the transition into Standard Australian English and the discourse of mathematics.

Using Jamaica, a former British colony where Jamaican Creole (JC) is the mass vernacular but Standard Jamaican English is the official language, as an illustrative case, this critical ethnographic study in three Jamaican schools examines the theoretical and practical challenges of language education policy (LEP) development and implementation in English-lexified Creole contexts where official recognition of the mass vernacular is absent and politically contentious; standard language ideology is pervasive; language boundaries are blurred; linguistic self-identification does not match actual language use; and language attitudes are deeply entrenched and contradictory. Data were collected and analyzed through classroom observations of six teachers over 9 months, interviews, demographic questionnaires, and curricular documents. Findings reveal conflicting teacher attitudes towards JC, and classroom practices heavily influenced by national examinations, that created a de facto LEP. Teachers simultaneously resisted and appropriated dominant linguicist ideologies in a Creole-speaking environment in response to actual vernacular language use in classrooms, adding a more complicated agentive dimension to Shohamy's (Language policy: hidden agenda and new approaches. Routledge, New York, 2006) framework linking ideologies to LEP through institutional structures.

This article looks at how four British-based poets born in the Caribbean exploit the rich language repertoire available to them in their work for children and young people. Following initial consideration of questions of definition and terminology, poetry collections by James Berry, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Valerie Bloom are discussed, with a focus on the interplay and creative tension between the different varieties of Caribbean creoles ("Bad Talk") and standard English evident in their work. Variation both between the four poets' usage and within each individual poet's work is considered, and a trend over time towards the inclusion of fewer creole-influenced poems is noted. These and other issues, such as the labelling of the four poets' work as "performance poetry" and the nature of the poets' contribution to British children's literature, are considered in the conclusion.

The present study was carried out in the context of the recent (2012) introduction of Kreol in the primary school curriculum in Mauritius. The time-tabling of Kreol as an optional subject offered at the same time as the other existing ancestral languages, institutionalised Kreol as an ancestral language, despite its status as a national language. The aim of the study was to investigate the ways in which the Standard 1 Kreol textbook reveals or reflects the ancestral identity that it has been institutionally assigned. In order to do so, a comparative perspective was adopted: the Standard 1 Kreol textbook was compared with the Standard 1 Hindi and Urdu textbooks, given that Hindi and Urdu are long established ancestral languages. A social semiotic analysis of the textbooks indicates that each textbook mediates ethno-religious discourses in varying ways and to varying degrees. It is argued that while changes in language policies and curricula open up "implementational and ideological spaces" (Hornberger, N.H. 2002. "Multilingual Language Policies and the Continua of Biliteracy: An Ecological Approach." "Language Policy" 1: 27-51), textbooks can be seen as one such space within which identities are maintained, (re)defined or resisted. As an "implementational and ideological space", the textbook is historically, socio-culturally and politically embedded, shaped and constrained.

While the extant literature has highlighted the important contribution of home literacy experiences to early literacy development, limited research has been carried out among children living in postcolonial contexts, where there is a mismatch between the home and school language. Such is the case of Mauritius. The present exploratory case study investigates the home literacy experiences of two groups of Mauritian pre-schoolers. Interviews with the children's mothers indicate that these children are immersed in home environments which value informational and educational reading materials, rather than pleasure reading materials. This preference for a skills orientation, rather than an entertainment approach, to early home literacy experiences is explained by the specificities of the local culture. The social and educational background of interviewed mothers, the gap between language of the home and language of literacy, and local reading and cultural practices all contribute to the didactic nature of the early home literacy experiences.

Since the introduction of the Education for All policy of the Government Assistance for Tuition Expenses (GATE) in Trinidad and Tobago, more tertiary level classrooms have been furnished with mixed linguistic and academic abilities and have accommodated more non-traditional tertiary-level entrants into the educational system. The expansion of the tertiary sector has also fostered lower minimum requirements for candidates entering tertiary institutions of learning (TILs), which differ from higher institutions of learning (HILs). More inclusive strategies in English composition courses are therefore needed to manage the reality of mixed abilities and greater non-standard language use among some of these learners, as part of the educational process. Therefore, the author proposes limited vernacular accommodation as a response to sectoral diversity and as a viable strategy for more inclusive education that would match the learner characteristics and the socio-educational contexts of TILs. In support of this recommendation, evidence-based findings from a case study among 39 students at a large private university exemplify the outcomes of vernacular accommodation in relation to student performance, linguistic identity and learner confidence. These outcomes further the cause of vernacular integration policies in education towards ensuring that true inclusion is upheld in the educational process. Moreover, the participatory power balance between students and teachers in this context will provide students with greater confidence and success in the short- and long-term, and will provide teachers with the critical awareness for transacting more equitable appraisals and for resisting hegemonic teaching and learning practices. In this way, true inclusion will extend beyond the mere financial ease of the GATE funding which is now available to all eligible students by consolidating the voice of marginalised learners in a conservative tertiary education system.

This paper sketches a comprehensive framework for modeling and interpreting language contact phenomena, with speakers' bilingual strategies in specific scenarios of language contact as its point of departure. Bilingual strategies are conditioned by social factors, processing constraints of speakers' bilingual competence, and perceived language distance. In a number of domains of language contact studies important progress has been made, including Creole studies, code-switching, language development, linguistic borrowing, and areal convergence. Less attention has been paid to the links between these fields, so that results in one domain can be compared with those in another. These links are approached here from the perspective of speaker optimization strategies. Four strategies are proposed: maximize structural coherence of the first language (L1); maximize structural coherence of the second language (L2); match between L1 and L2 patterns where possible; and rely on universal principles of language processing. These strategies can be invoked to explain outcomes of language contact. Different outcomes correspond to different interactions of these strategies in bilingual speakers and their communities.

This paper argues that Dev Virahsawmy, an author who manipulates literary translation for the purposes of linguistic prestige formation and re-negotiation, is a critical language-policy practitioner, as his work fills an important gap in language planning scholarship. A micro-analysis of the translation of a Shakespearean sonnet into Mauritian Creole is carried out with a view to exploring the dynamic interconnections between the macro-(social) level of language prestige and that of the micro-(text) level in relation to both the source and the target languages. This exploration proves to be not only valuable in its own right for postcolonial creolistics, but it also informs the debate on the "linguistic imperialism" of English. (Contains 3 notes.)

Indigenous children growing up in the remote regions of Australia live in multilingual communities which are often undergoing rapid language shift. In these communities, children are exposed to a range of language input, including the traditional language of the area, a local creole and Standard Australian English. The extent to which the different languages are used may vary by age of interlocutor as well as other factors. In this paper we examine the input to five children between the ages of two and four living in a small remote community. Recordings were made of each child interacting with caregivers of different ages to identify the range of language the children are exposed to. The majority of the input was in the local creole. This represents a rapid shift from the traditional language, Walmajarri, which was widely spoken when the community was established in the late 1980s. The majority of input in the traditional language came from the older interlocutors, suggesting that the language is severely endangered. Standard Australian English was used only minimally, although once they enter the formal school system, SAE will be the only language used for their education.

This paper addresses the issue of the emergence of new standards of English in the postcolonial world by means of a language attitude study conducted in the Caribbean island of Trinidad that involved rating the accents of newscasters. Accents represented in the clips played to respondents comprised various local as well as non-local ones. The respondents disfavoured a local accent displaying many features shared with Trinidad's English-based Creole and particularly favoured a local accent that showed the comparatively greatest distance from Creole. Intermediate Trinidadian accents as well as non-local ones were in between and rather undifferentiated. We suggest that several partially conflicting factors are relevant to these results--a perception of Standard English in terms of distance from Creole, increasing endonormativity, as well as global influences that are particularly present in the media domain--and we support the notion that Standard English is becoming a more complex phenomenon in today's world that needs to be considered in relation to contexts of use. (Contains 7 tables and 10 footnotes.)

It is generally accepted that second language (L2) acquisition becomes more difficult as one grows older and that success in adult L2 acquisition is highly variable. Nevertheless, humans in language contact situations have to cope with intergroup communication. This article examines the ways society has responded to this challenge. It describes eleven strategies or workarounds that humans use to deal with this problem: developing lingua francas, forming Sprachbunds, practicing exogenous marriage, undergoing language shift, learning the target language imperfectly, developing a pidgin or creole, shifting the learning burden to children, relying on individual differences in aptitude among learners, developing the art and practice of translation, developing machine translation technology, and providing instruction. The eleven strategies can be understood as involving four broad societal responses to the burden of SLA: to simplify the learning task, to create a simpler language, to leave it to a special set of learners, and to provide special training. Finally, the article offers some speculations about the evolutionary reasons for the difficulties experienced in adult L2 acquisition. (Contains 2 notes.)

Mauritius is a multilingual island, where there is a linguistic and literacy paradox. While Mauritian Creole dominates as the spoken language of the population, English and French are the main print languages, as well as the main languages of literacy and education. In such a complex situation, preschool is an interesting terrain in which to observe children's first official introduction to the printed word. The aim of this paper is to consider the ways in which preschool teachers expose children to print and decoding skills and some of the factors shaping their choices and pedagogical practices. This paper uses data from a longitudinal case study, using an ethnographic approach, to describe and analyse the strategies used by three teachers as they expose a group of four- to five-year-olds to the printed word in a government preschool. I argue that in foreign language contexts such as Mauritius, children's exposure to the printed word is often cosmetic and educational, with emphasis on the direct teaching of some decoding skills. I also argue that the relationship that the children build with print is one of seriousness, associated with schoolwork, thus playing down the meaning-making, more playful and more entertaining functions and uses of print. This is related to local linguistic, sociocultural and educational factors. (Contains 5 tables, 10 figures and 3 notes.)

Negotiating their double identity as Mauritians and Muslims in multilingual and in multiethnic Mauritius, Mauritian Muslims have been socialised into reading and writing in Kreol in madrassahs, while they have never been exposed to Kreol literacy in mainstream education. At the point where Kreol is being introduced as an optional school subject, and given that the Mauritian Muslim community has made particular use of written Kreol in the madrassah, this community becomes an interesting test case to explore its language and literacy ideologies with respect to Kreol. A case study approach was used to investigate madrassah informants' language and literacy ideologies, their attitudes to and perceptions of Kreol at the madrassah and at school. The findings reveal that they tolerate written Kreol at the madrassah, but that they use a French-Kreol literacy variety and aspire to shift to French in the near future. Furthermore, they have ambivalent attitudes towards the introduction of Kreol as an optional school subject and potential medium of instruction. These findings are discussed in relation to the micro-practices occurring in the madrassah and the macro-context, both of which reinforce dominant historically situated popular ideologies about Kreol literacy. (Contains 1 table, 1 figure, and 4 notes.)

Education policy always appears to be controversial, especially in post-colonial nations. In Vanuatu, the dual educative system inherited from the period of colonization has raised many debates. The government of Vanuatu is certainly aware of national educational issues in the school system such as the poor literacy rate and high school fees but finding solutions in a complex multilingual context is difficult. As a sovereign state Vanuatu not only has to articulate its own linguistic problems while dealing with a complex linguistic colonial heritage, but needs to pay specific attention to donors since the country is still economically dependent. As in many others states, Vanuatu has to simultaneously deal with local issues and global interests. Through the example of Vanuatu's national education policy, this article shows how global pressures and national linguistic ideologies can influence decisions made in a post-colonial state.

There are now significant numbers of children who speak a language other than English when they enter the formal school system in Australia. Many of these children come from a language background that is entirely different from the school language. Many Indigenous children, however, come from creole-speaking backgrounds where their home language may share features with the school language whilst remaining substantially different in other ways. What often makes this situation more challenging is the tendency to view creole, rather than as a different language, as a kind of deficient version of the standard language. Children entering the school system with a creole thus often encounter considerable difficulties. In addition, teachers who are not trained in teaching creole-speaking children may not recognise these difficulties. This paper explores some of these issues in the Australian context with reference to home languages such as Kriol and Torres Strait Creole (TSC) as well as minority dialects such as Australian Aboriginal English (AAE), and discusses possible resolutions.

The language ecologies of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Queensland are characterised by widespread language shift to contact language varieties, yet they remain largely invisible in discourses involving Indigenous languages and education. This invisibility--its various causes and its many implications--are explored through a discussion of two creoles which developed in Queensland: Yumplatok (formerly Torres Strait Creole) and Yarrie Lingo. Although both are English lexified and originate in Queensland, they represent different histories and different trajectories of awareness and recognition. The Yumplatok discussion emphasises issues arising from speakers' own attitudes, including Sellwood's own lived experiences. The Yarrie Lingo discussion highlights issues arising from its creole-lexifier relationship with (Standard Australian) English. Finally, this paper examines a recently published government language report, highlighting the ways that Indigenous creoles are marginalised: this marginalisation exacerbates their invisibility in mainstream discourse.

Speech pathology assessment within cross-cultural contexts, where the assessor and client differ in their cultural backgrounds, can create many challenges for assessment usage and implementation. With Australia being home to people from many cultures, this is a particular challenge for speech pathologists working in this country. This paper outlines the development of an assessment specifically for Aboriginal children living in a discrete region of the Kimberley in Western Australia. This assessment was developed in collaboration with local language experts as well as speech pathologists experienced in the area of assessment with Indigenous children. Nearly all parts of the assessment were administered by a local co-worker in the children's first language, Kimberley or Fitzroy Valley Kriol. The paper outlines the specific components of the assessment as well as the approaches taken to ensure fair and accurate assessment of children's communication skills. It highlights the benefits of collaborating with local co-workers and provides those working with Indigenous children in Australia with practical activities to consider.

Aboriginal English has been documented in widely separated parts of Australia and, despite some stylistic and regional variation, is remarkably consistent across the continent, and provides a vehicle for the common expression of Aboriginal identity. There is, however, some indeterminacy in the way in which the term is used in much academic and public discourse. There are diverse assumptions as to its relation to pidgin, creole and interlanguage varieties, as well as to Australian English. In an attempt to provide some clarification, this paper compares Aboriginal English with the main varieties with which it bears some relationship, either historically (as in the case of the English of Southeast England and Ireland) or geographically (as in the case of Australian English and Australian pidgins and creoles). It does this by employing the morphosyntactic database of the "World Atlas of Varieties of English" (Kortmann & Lunkenheimer, 2012). The electronic database on morphosyntactic variation in varieties of spoken English (eWAVE) isolates 235 variable features and enables their relative prevalence to be compared across varieties. A comparison of Aboriginal English with six relevant varieties on this database leads to the view that it retains significant influence from the English varieties of Southeast England and of Ireland, in many ways not shared with Australian English and that it has a great deal more feature overlap with Australian creoles than with Australian English, though a significant percentage of its features is shared only with other English varieties rather than creoles. The findings support the view that Aboriginal English is an English variety of post-creole origin, though not a creole, and that it is not directly related to Australian English. In the light of these findings, it is argued that Aboriginal English speakers will be disadvantaged in an education system which assumes that they are speakers of Australian English.

Texts in Aboriginal English (AE) and creole varieties have been created by Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers for a range of purposes. In this paper, we focus on materials created in and for five educational contexts, and investigate the orthographic or spelling systems developed in each setting. Choices about orthography are guided by linguistic and non-linguistic considerations. They are sensitive to matters of prestige and identity, and new orthographic conventions are subject to comparison with "correct", "standard" spellings. We explore the processes, motivations and rationale that drive choices for the orthographic conventions and the diverse outcomes in the five settings.

This study aims to explain how the practice of two languages (French and Creole) in French overseas departments affects the first educational competencies acquired by children. The students' performance in both languages was investigated at the beginning of kindergarten, and their reading capacities were measured at the end of Grade 1. The data analysis shows that the practice of Creole has no negative impact on success at reading in French. Furthermore, it appears that the students who performed the best in reading were those who were either more competent in French than in Creole, or those who were equally competent in both languages, according to their assessed reading competence. Thus, also discussed is the necessity of early exposure to a language's written code and the contribution that bilingualism makes to learning processes of reading.

This article analyzes four Hollywood films set in Hawai'i to shed light on how particular languages and language varieties "style" (Auer 2007; Coupland 2007) Local/Hawaiian and mainland U.S. characters as certain kinds of people. Through an analysis of films featuring "haole" ("white, outsider") male protagonists who are on various journeys in Hawai'i, we analyze how cultural difference is constructed through divergent language choice, mock languages, and acts of linguistic bridging by quasi-Local characters. We draw upon Communication Accommodation Theory (Giles & Coupland 1991) to explain how linguistic divergence establishes dichotomous characterizations through language choice and other non-accommodating behaviors. As our analysis shows, Hollywood styling perpetuates Orientalist discourses (Said 1978) about "whiteness" and "nativeness" by dichotomizing Local and Hawaiian people, and by characterizing Local characters as largely antagonistic toward outsiders. At the same time, the films attempt to avoid too close a linkage to colonialist discourses by establishing quasi-Local "haole" characters as linguistic "buffers" who act as conduits for Hawaiian worldviews and Local knowledge, and who are styled linguistically as partially Local through their knowledge of Hawai'i Creole and Hawaiian. (Contains 5 notes.)

Crosslinguistic influence has been seen in bilingual adult and child learners when compared to monolingual learners. For speakers of Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol there is no monolingual group for comparison, yet crosslinguistic influence can be seen in how the speakers resolve competition between case-marking and word order systems in each language. Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol are two new Australian mixed languages, spoken in similar, yet slightly different, sociolinguistic contexts, and with similar, yet slightly different, argument marking systems. The different sociolinguistic situations and systems of argument marking lead to a difference in how speakers of each language interpret simple transitive sentences in a comprehension task. Light Warlpiri speakers rely on ergative case-marking as an indicator of agents more often than Gurindji Kriol speakers do. Conversely, Gurindji Kriol speakers rely on word order more often than Light Warlpiri speakers do.

This article discusses a documentary film project produced by high school students in Hawai'i that investigated the value of Pidgin (Hawai'i Creole) in schools and society, and which ultimately aimed to address the problem of "linguicism" (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1990). The project was carried out within a critical language awareness framework that treated students as knowledge producers and which provided them with the opportunity to use their own communities and languages as repositories of knowledge and as sites for learning about the relationship between language and society. Through exploring the meanings and values of their language, the students produced a documentary that ended up challenging many of their own assumptions about Pidgin, and which revealed the importance of "translingual" practices (Pennycook, 2007). This article draws on material from the documentary and interviews with the students to illustrate how the students' views towards Pidgin changed during the course of the project, with a particular focus on the language's legitimacy. The results suggest that a students-as-knowledge-producers approach may offer more potential to challenge linguicism than many contrastive analysis approaches currently being used. By treating non-mainstream languages as subject matter in their own right, without reference or comparison to the dominant language, we argue that these languages earn more respect and acknowledgment in school settings and beyond. (Contains 2 figures.)

Mauritius is a linguistically diverse island: most people on the island are native speakers of Mauritian Creole, a French-lexified Creole; English is the written medium of instruction in primary schools and French is taught as a compulsory subject. The discontinuity between the home language and the school languages is viewed as problematic by some local educationists, who argue against children being made literate and receiving education in languages other than their first language. Focusing on Mauritian children's initial contact with education in the preschool, this research paper uses a case study approach to investigate preschool teachers' language choices and language practices in a context where they can use Creole, French or English. The data show that the observed teachers adopt French as the dominant language of communication, with switches to Creole, English and the oriental languages, often leading children to being mute or engaging in very restricted communicative interactions. Analysing the relationship between the existing language policy and the local language dynamics, the author of this paper argues that in such ex-colonial multilingual contexts where existing language policies are vague, the preschool is a site where preschool teachers juggle emotional, educational and social concerns through their language practices.

This article is a comparative look at the cluster reduction patterns of English #sC onsets in three groups of children. Data from 40 monolingual, 40 Spanish-English bilingual and 40 Haitian Creole-English bilingual children were examined. While there were several similarities in the patterns exhibited by the three groups, there was a sharp contrast regarding /sl-/ clusters between monolingual children and the two groups of bilinguals. Among the predictions offered for reduction patterns in recent literature, "factorial typology" of Pater and Barlow (2003) appeared to be the most successful. (Contains 4 figures and 1 table.)

Despite their (albeit limited) access to Standard Australian English through education, Australian Indigenous communities have maintained their own dialect (Aboriginal English) for intragroup communication and are increasingly using it as a medium of cultural expression in the wider community. Most linguists agree that the most significant early ancestor of Aboriginal English is New South Wales Pidgin, which developed in the first decades after the European occupation of Australia in 1788. Influence of present or past Aboriginal languages can be traced in Aboriginal English both directly and by way of NSW Pidgin and other contact varieties. Recent work in Western Australia has proposed conceptual continuities with Aboriginal culture which underlie contemporary Aboriginal English grammar and discourse. What has not been done hitherto is to relate the conceptual continuities to patternings in the pidgin and creole antecedents of Aboriginal English. This paper highlights conceptual continuities across Australian pidgins, creoles and Aboriginal English and suggests implications for school learning by medium of standard Australian English. (Contains 8 tables.)

There are increasing numbers of students entering Australian secondary schools whose first language is not English. Compound this with the numbers of Indigenous students who speak Creoles or who have distinct dialects, and teachers in secondary English classrooms are facing a struggle to implement the syllabus and engage students. The issue of how to assist students, especially Indigenous students, attain their academic potential and achieve good results is not new and this paper looks at how other Englishes can be used to scaffold students' learning in and understanding of Standard Australian English. This paper compares the current Australian educational context to similar situations in the United States and the United Kingdom to find the best practices for English teachers in lower secondary classrooms to utilise.

In the 19th century, in the eastern half of Prussia's region of Upper Silesia, continental Europe's second largest industrial basin emerged. In the course of the accelerated urbanization that followed, an increasing number of German- and Germanic-speakers arrived in this overwhelmingly Slavophone area that historically skirted the Germanic dialect continuum to the west. The resultant dynamic interaction between Slavic and German/ic-speakers led to the emergence of an Upper Silesian Slavic-Germanic pidgin that, in the late 19th century, became creolized. The 1922 partition of this region between Germany and Poland led to respective Germanization and Polonization of a population that was typically multiglossic in the creole, in the local Slavic dialect, in standard German, and in standard Polish. Successive dramatic reversals in these policies of Germanization and Polonization between 1939 and 1989 ensured the survival of a Polonized version of the creole, which the local population perceives either as a dialect of German, or a dialect of Polish, or their own (national) Silesian language.

A year after the earthquake that devastated Haiti in January 2010, Lehman and Logan have a virtual conversation with Jocelyne Trouillot, author and publisher of Haitian Creole children's books, founder of the Haiti section of the International Board on Books for Young People, and head of the Universite Caraibe in Port-au-Prince. They discuss the effects of the widespread destruction and Trouillot's involvement in rebuilding her university and the Haitian education system, her work with traumatized children and colleagues, the workshops she developed for promoting new writers of children's books, and her own writing. Anne Pellowski and Gail Bush, who have helped to lead these workshops in Haiti, also describe their experiences. Trouillot provides background for the status of language and literacy in the Haitian context. ["Life and Literacy in Haiti: A Conversation with Jocelyne Trouillot" was written with Anne Pellowski & Gail Bush.]

New York City sets itself apart from many locations in the USA due to its citizens' unparalleled diversity. The degree to which schools either build upon or suppress the backgrounds of their linguistically and culturally diverse students is dependent on the degree to which they can provide an education that is both bilingual and multicultural. This qualitative study considers the challenges to teaching bilingually "and" multiculturally for Chinese, Haitian Creole, Russian, and Spanish bilingual teachers in New York City. The study considers the challenges specific to each ethnolinguistic group, which are based in their cultural ideologies, transnational histories, immigration experiences, and views of US schools. (Contains 1 table and 4 notes.)

The shifts underway in contemporary social conditions call for a new alignment between the specializations constituting English Studies: namely, literature, applied linguistics, and rhetoric and composition. Postcolonial social movements have generated new language, textual, and literary practices. These developments bring to the fore practices that have always characterized communication, but ignored in English Studies because dominant paradigms have not been sensitive to these practices. Influenced by modernist values, English Studies took on a trajectory that isolated the object of analysis in order to identify the finite rules that capture the core of communicative practices. Postcolonial communicative conditions draw attention to liminalities, flows, and mixtures that require a situated, multimodal, and multisensory understanding of languages and texts, and the plurality of meanings that emerge from a negotiation of diverse contexts. To understand such language practices, students and scholars have to draw from all three specializations and practise a creole scholarship.

This study analyzes the connections among multilingual language practices, multilingual literacy practices, and social identities in two Sunni madrassahs in Mauritius. The study is framed by sociolinguistic and poststructuralist perspectives on language and identity, and social practice views of literacy. Data collection and analysis involved observations, interviews, and the analysis of written documents. In a national context that has long rejected Mauritian Creole as a language of education and literacy, the madrassah is nonetheless a place where both oral and written Mauritian Creole, among other languages, is used to religiously educate the children. The study revealed that the madrassah is a site where multilingual, multiliterate, and multiscriptural practices are used as resources to provide religious instruction, while at the same time being a place where fluid identities are shaped and negotiated through these resources. These findings suggest that dichotomies between institutionalized and local vernacular literacies and between religious and secular identities do not reflect the complexity of identities being constituted and expressed at the observed madrassahs. Speakers and readers may use multiple oral and written codes to negotiate social identities, with some identities being more negotiable than others. (Contains 5 notes, 3 tables, and 3 figures.)