Using a Pidgin Language in Formal Education:

Help or Hindrance?
JEFF SIEGEL
University of New England, Australia

Pidgin and Creole languages are rarely used informal education because of three
arguments (1) they are degenerate languages, (2) it is a waste of time to use a
pidgin or creole when the standard language is the key to success in education
and employment, and (3) theuseofapidginor creole will interfere with students'
subsequent acquisition of the standard language Linguists can easily refute
the first two arguments, but not the third, because of the special circumstances
when apidgin or creole is LI and its lexifier language is L2 This article presents
the results of research which examines the claims of the third argument This
research is part of an evaluation of a preschool program in Papua New Guinea
which uses Tok Pisin (Melanesian Pidgin English) as themedium of instruction
and initial literacy for students who thengoon loan English-medium community
school The results show that initial instruction in Tok Pisin is actually more of
a help than a hindrance to learning English and other subjects

INTRODUCTION
A pidgin is a new language that emerges as a contact vernacular among people
who need to communicate but do not share a common language Its lexicon is
generally denved from one dominant language, called the 'lexifier language',
but its grammar is unique An example is Melanesian Pidgin, lexified by English,
which arose as the result of trading and labour recruiting in the Pacific and stabi-
lized among Melanesian plantation labourers in Queensland and Samoa in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century Although a pidgin normally has quite
restncted use, it may later become what is called an 'expanded pidgin* This is
what happened to Melanesian Pidgin when it was brought home by returning
labourers and became the most widely used lingua franca in three Melanesian
countries Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu Today, it is
used in radio broadcasting and parliamentary debates and has even become a
written language, codified in dictionaries and used regularly in books and news-
papers
A creole is a language that anses as the mother tongue of a newly formed com-
munity of people who do not share a common language other than an emerging
or already established pidgin Like a pidgin, its lexicon is primarily denved
from another language, but it has its own grammatical rules Unlike a pidgin, a
creole has a community of native speakers, and is not different from any other
language in its full range of functions. Examples are English-lexified Jamaican
Creole and French-lexuied Haitian Creole, both of which arose among African

AppliedLinguistics,Vol 18,No 1 O Oxford University Press 1997

 JEFF SIEGEL 87

slaves in Canbbean plantations in the eighteenth century Today, these Creoles

are the mother tongue of the vast majority in each country
While pidgins and Creoles are described by linguists as legitimate languages,
with their own grammatical rules, they are still considered 'corrupted' or 'bas-
tard' languages by many educators, even by their own speakers This is mainly
because of their superficial resemblance to their lexifier languages For this
reason, pidgins and Creoles rarely have any official use in formal education,
even in countries such as Jamaica where the creole is the mother tongue of the
vast majority Instead, the standard vanety of the lexifier, most often the former
colonial language, is usually the sole language of education
Arguments against using pidgins and Creoles in education are of three types
The first type refers to the supposed 'degenerate' nature of pidgins and Creoles
themselves Rickford and Traugott (1985 255) point out 'One common charge
is that the creole is not a real or legitimate language, this claim deriving from
the erroneous but frequently asserted claim that it has no grammar or is merely
a mangled version of the Standard' For example, in arguing against the use of
Torres Strait Creole as a medium of education, Shnukal (1992 4) notes that it is
'stigmatized as an inferior type of English, a "rubbish language'*' One of the
most extreme examples is given by Kephart (1992 68) with reference to educa-
tors' attitudes towards creole in the Caribbean
[They say] you can't express yourself precisely or accurately in Creole, children should
be taken away from their creole speaking parents at birth and placed in standard-Eng-
lish speaking homes, because if they spend their whole lives speaking creole, their
brain cells will deteriorate1
The second type of argument is that it is a waste of time to use a pidgin or creole
in education because in each country where they are spoken the educational
goal is to learn the standard vanety, and, indeed, knowing the standard is the
key to success in education and employment Therefore, it follows that time
should not be taken away from learning the standard. For example, Shnukal
(1992 4) notes that in the Torres Strait, people are 'reluctant to accept the use
of creole as a formal medium of instruction in their schools, seeing it as a
method of depriving them of instruction in the kind of English that white
people use, and thus condemning them to permanent under-class status* This
argument has the underlying assumption that there is a direct relationship
between instruction time and achievement in the standard, mainstream educa-
tional language (the 'time-on-task' hypothesis)
The third argument is that using a pidgin or creole in education will actually
interfere with students' subsequent acquisition of the standard This argument
is used by people who may otherwise support the use of vernacular languages in
education, but think that pidgins and Creoles are a special case because of their
apparently close relationship to their lexifier languages For example, Thomas
(1990 245) describes reactions to proposals made at the 1981 Vanuatu Language
Planning Conference that Bislama, the local dialect of Melanesian Pidgin, be
used in the formal education system
88 PIDGIN IN FORMAL EDUCATION

One of the most common fears concerning the introduction of Bislama as a language of
education is that, owing to lexical similarities, negative transfer occurs when pupils
subsequently learn English This fear was also expressed at the conference, when it
was claimed that when children learn Bislama at an early age 'it tends to interfere with
their learning of English'

Similar reactions occurred at the 1988 Workshop on Vernacular Education and

Bilingual Education in Australia and the South Pacific in response to suggestions
that Melanesian Pidgin be used in bilingual programs in linguistically heteroge-
neous urban areas (Siegel 1993 300)
The first argument ('degenerate language') would be easily refuted by lin-
guists The complex grammars of many Creoles have been described and other
previously unwritten languages, such as Bahasa Indonesia, have been standard-
ized and elaborated for use in the full range of modern contexts, including
higher education The second argument ('waste of time') can also be refuted by
reference to many studies showing the educational advantages of teaching initial
literacy in the mother tongue For example, in a recent survey of bihngualism
and second language learning Cummins (1993) describes research showing
that literacy skills can readily be transferred from one language to another, and
countering the 'time-on-task' hypothesis When time is taken away for learning
literacy in the mother tongue, it actually has a positive effect on eventual achieve-
ment in the mainstream educational language
At first glance, the third argument ('negative transfer' or 'interference') can
also be refuted Transfer was a key concept in the early days of second language
acquisition (SLA) research Under the prevailing behaviourist point of view in
the 1950s and 1960s, it was assumed that the main obstacle to learning was inter-
ference from prior knowledge It was thought that old habits from the first lan-
guage, or another already known language (LI), got in the way of attempts to
learn new habits in the target language (L2) The degree of difficulty in language
learning depended on the similarities or differences between the LI and the L2
If they were similar, then learning could take place easily with the 'positive
transfer' of LI knowledge to the L2 But if they were different, learning would
be difficult and there would be interference or 'negative transfer', leading to
errors
However, these views have now been well and truly discredited Chomsky
(1959) argued convincingly against behaviourist accounts of language acquisi-
tion in general, and empirical SLA research in the late 1960s and 1970s (e g
Dulay and Burt 1973) showed negative transfer accounted for only a small pro-
portion of errors It was found that in learning English as a second language, as
in first language acquisition, there were natural sequences of morphological
and syntactic development which had nothing to do with the LI These findings
led to a major shift in SLA research—to all but ignore the role of the LI and
transfer, and to concentrate instead on the contribution of universal processes
of language learning
Nevertheless, in recent years, the pendulum has swung back somewhat and
 JEFF SIEGEL • 89

SLA research is once again concerned with transfer The main concentration,
however, has been to identify transfer constraints factors that either promote
or inhibit transfer Several factors have been identified which promote negative
transfer (or 'interference')—here defined as any negative effect that a previously
known language (LI) has on learning another language (L2) Interestingly,
many of these factors occur in situations where a pidgin or Creole is the LI and
the lexifier language is the L2 I will illustrate these with examples from Tok
Pisin, the Papua New Guinea dialect of Melanesian Pidgin

NEGATIVE TRANSFER
There are two ways that the LI can have a negative effect on L2 learning it can
bring about 'transfer errors'—the use of LI features inappropriately in the
L2—or it can delay passage through a normal developmental sequence
The first factor that may promote negative transfer is language distance, or the
degree of typological similarity or difference between the LI and the L2 When
corresponding features are similar, negative transfer (as well as positive transfer)
may be more likely (Wode 1978), and progression through a developmental
sequence may be delayed or inhibited (Zobl 1982) For example, a study of Swed-
lsh-Finnish bilingual s learning English (Ringbom 1978) shows greater lexical
transfer from Swedish (typologically similar to English) than from Finnish
(typologically distant from English) The lexicon of a pidgin or Creole is, of
course, superficially similar to that of its lexifier language This is illustrated by
the following sentence from Tok Pisin
Em i binpait-im olpik 'She hit the pigs'
The Tok Pisin words are derived from English, but most of them have different
meanings or functions em comes from htm but can mean 'he, him, she, her, it1,
bin is from been but acts as a past tense marker, pait- is from fight but means
'hit' as well, -im is from him but is a transitive suffix, and ol is from all but acts
as a plural marker, without the meaning 'all' It is easy to see how the apparent
similarity of Tok Pisin to English forms could possibly lead to different kinds of
transfer errors These could be of a phonological nature, such as saying 'pight'
for fight, of a lexical nature, such as 'She fought [meaning "hit"] the pigs', or of
a grammatical nature, such as 'She fight all pig'
A closely related factor is perceived distance (or 'psychotypology') L2 lear-
ners are said to be more likely to transfer a feature from their LI if they do not
perceive a significant difference between the LI and the L2 (Keilerman 1977,
Ellis 1994 328) As already mentioned, speakers of pidgins and Creoles often do
not see them as distinct or distant from their lexifier languages
A third factor is complexity LI features that are less complex than corre-
sponding L2 features may also be more likely to cause transfer errors or to
delay development For example, Zobl (1982 180) claims that in second lan-
guage acquisition, as in other language contact situations, complex structures
'undergo modification by formally simpler structures' It is generally agreed
that linguistic features of a pidgin or Creole are characteristically less complex
90 PIDGIN IN FORMAL EDUCATION

(or 'simplified') than those corresponding features of the lexifier. This can be
seen in the Tok Pisin example above A single third person pronoun in Tok Pisin
em corresponds to five different pronouns in English. Past tense is marked analy-
tically in Tok Pisin with preverbal bin and no change in the verb, while in English
it is marked synthetically in three different ways' with a suffix (having three dif-
ferent allomorphs, as in walk-ed [-t], sign-ed [-d] and sight-ed [-ad]), with root
modification (e,g fight-fought) and with suppletion (e g go-went) Thus, the
comparative simplicity of the Tok Pisin structure would lead one to expect trans-
fer errors such as 'She been fight the pigs'
A fourth factor is markedness linguistically unmarked or natural features are
more subject to transfer, but marked or typologically unusual features are not
(Eckman 1977, 1985, Hyltenstam 1984) A defining characteristic of pidgins
and Creoles is that their linguistic features are generally unmarked, especially
compared to those of their lexifiers (Muhlhausler 1986, Holm 1988) For exam-
ple, Tok Pisin has a lack of a voiced/ voiceless distinction in final consonants, so
that the English words pig and pick both came into the language as pik. This is
considered an unmarked feature, while the English distinction is considered
marked Thus, it would be difficult for Tok Pisin speakers to learn this distinction
in English, and transfer errors would be likely (in pronunciation or spelling).
This has been shown by Eckman (1977) for speakers of German, which also has
the marked lack of final voiced/ voiceless contrast
Because of these factors, it is theoretically quite feasible that when a pidgin or
Creole is the LI and its lexifier language is the L2, there could be more negative
transfer than in other second language learning situations Empirical evidence
is needed to find out whether this is really the case, and whether using pidgins
and Creoles as languages of formal education is actually a help or a hindrance to
subsequently learning the standard form of the lexifier language
Some limited research has been done on the effects of using a Creole language
(spoken as the mother tongue of the vast majority of the community) in schools
as the medium of instruction and initial literacy Studies have been done in the
following places Haiti (Bentohla 1987), the Seychelles (Ravel and Thomas
1985), and the Northern Territory of Australia (Murtagh 1982) The study
reported in the remainder of this article is the first, to my knowledge, on the
effects of similarly using a pidgin language (spoken as a second or auxiliary lan-
guage by the vast majority of the community) The findings provide data that
will help educators and government officials make more informed decisions
with regard to educational language policy

THE TOK PISIN PREP-SCHOOL PROGRAM

In 1989,1 began an evaluation of a pre-school program in Papua New Guinea
(PNG) using Tok Pisin to teach initial literacy. Children in PNG generally start
their formal education at the age of 7 or 8 Most attend the local 'community
school1—that is, the government-run school. The medium of instruction from
Grade One at all community schools is English Education is not free or univer-
sal, and parents must pay school fees, which is no easy task for the majority of
 JEFF SIEGEL 91

Papua New Guineans who are subsistence farmers However, since the late
1980s, the Department of Education has been encouraging communities to set
up preparatory classes to teach initial literacy in the local vernacular or Tok
Pisin before children enter Grade One (see Siegel 1993 303)
The program being evaluated is run by Pacific Island Ministries in the
Ambunti District of the East Sepik Province, and called the Tok Pisra 'Prep-
school* Program Its aim is to prepare children aged 5-6 for the community
schools by teaching initial hteracy in Tok Pisin as well as initial numeracy, basic
health, crafts, religion, and other subjects
The Ambunti district straddles the Sepik River southwest of the provincial
capital of Wewak As there are no roads in the district, it is accessible only by tra-
velling up the river or flying into the airstrip at the district centre The area cov-
ered by the program is mainly along the river and its tributaries, but it also
extends out of the district and up to the Sepik Plains area below the Pnnce Alex-
ander Mountains The area it covers is approximately 150 kilometres from east
to west and 70 from north to south There are more than a dozen separate indi-
genous languages spoken in the area but knowledge of Tok Pisin is wide-
spread—learned by most children at an early age simultaneously with an
indigenous language or as a second language
The Prep-school Program is a community-based one A village asks for a Prep-
school to be set up by forming a committee and sending a representative to Paci-
fic Island Ministries (PIM) who then do a feasibility study If the village is
found suitable, the committee must then get permission from the head teacher
of the lo<-al community school, provide one or two people with some primary
education to be trained as teachers, provide land for the school and build the
classroom PIM trains the teachers and provides basic equipment and teaching
matenals, usually cyclostyled or screen-printed in Ambunti

THE EVALUATION
The program is being evaluated according to both socio-cultural and educa-
tional criteria, using ethnographic, survey, and formal comparative data The
ethnographic research consists of unstructured interviews with community
school teachers, village committee members and parents in which they are
asked to give their general opinions about the program' The teachers are also
asked to describe any differences between students who have gone through the
Prep-school program and those who have not, in terms of adjustment to school,
learning ability, participation, and co-operation Furthermore, in light of the
predictions of interference made by senior educators and administrators, tea-
chers are also asked a specific question about the effect of having learned initial
hteracy in Tok Pisin on the English of the former prep-school students In addi-
tion to this ethnographic research, teachers' opinions and attitudes are also
being surveyed by questionnaires and information is being gathered on yearly
numbers of students and on drop-out rates
The formal comparative research is being earned out in the community school
at the district centre of Ambunti (St Joseph's Community School) It involves
92 PIDGIN IN FORMAL EDUCATION

comparing the educational achievement of students who have gone through the
prep-school program and those who have not It is common in research of this
type to use established educational or psychological tests to measure this
achievement However, since these tests are often culturally inappropriate, and
since I am interested in studying success or failure of the program according to
the community, the decision was made to use locally familiar and accepted cri-
teria namely community school term test results These tests are normally held
at the end of each of the four terms in the school year (However, in practice
they may be held at the end of only two or three terms) Marks are given in three
subject areas English, Mathematics ('Maths'), and General Subjects (health,
social science, etc) In English, the tests mainly include objective questions on
reading comprehension, grammar, and spelling
The term test results of 'ex prep' students (who have gone through the prep-
school program) are being compared to those of the 'no prep' students (who
have not gone through the program) There are three research hypotheses
H o there is no difference between the marks of the two groups,
Hi the marks of the 'no prep' students are significantly higher than those of
the 'ex prep' students, especially in English,
H 2 the marks of the 'ex prep' students are significantly higher than those of the
'no prep' students
H[ would be the prediction of educators who oppose the use of Melanesian
pidgin and say that it would 'spoil' the children's English because of 'negative
transfer' or 'interference'
Because their one or two years of extra formal education may give ex prep stu-
dents an initial advantage, the marks are also being examined in upper as well
as lower grades, with the prediction being that any initial differences between
the groups would be neutralized over time
Of course, this expenmental design presents some problems having to do with
other extraneous variables For example, parents who choose the prep-school
program are obviously concerned with their children's education and may give
them more support So these factors have to be kept in mind in analysing the
results It would be difficult to make definite conclusions about the effectiveness
of teaching initial literacy in Tok Pisin However, if we look primarily at whether
or not Hi can be rejected, then the design is adequate

RESULTS TO DATE
Results at an earlier stage of the project are described in Siegel (1992) Some of the
figures have been revised here on trie basis of further field work and cross-check-
ing of data First of all, interviews and questionnaires show that community
school teachers think that the 'ex prep' students are well-adjusted, co-operative,
and quick at learning They are more active in participation in class and have
better attendance records than 'no prep' students With regard to English, the tea-
chers report that there are no special problems of interference, and that the influ-
ence of Tok Pisin can be seen only sometimes in spelling and pronunciation The
 JEFF SIEGEL 93

Table 1 Growth of the TokPisin

Prep-school Program
Year No of schools Approx no of student*

1985 1 150
1986 1 240
1987 I 130
1988 5 300
1989 12 650
1990 14 700
1991 22 960
1992 23 994
1993 29 578
1994 32 916

'ex prep' students actually learn English more easily than the 'no prep' students
The same is true for Mathematics and General Subjects to some extent Several
teachers said that the Prep-school Program makes their job easier Of the three
head teachers interviewed, the two from 'bush schools' (small schools outside
the district centre) were extremely favourable in their comments The head tea-
cher from the Ambunti community school, however, was not so impressed He
said that the Prep-school Program helps the students when they first come to
school, but after one or two terms, the other students catch up Interviews with
parents, committee members, and students reveal only favourable attitudes to
the program
Figures have been compiled on the number of prep-schools established since
the beginning of the program and on the yearly enrolmentfigures(Table 1) The
figures clearly show the expansion of the program, as more and more commu-
nities have established prep-schools The fall of student numbers in 1993 was
due to a shortage of funds at PIM, so that only 15 of the 29 established schools
could be run This situation was remedied in 1994, but even with the establish-
ment of more schools, numbers did not reach 1992 levels because of new govern-
ment restrictions on class sizes
At this stage of the research, figures on drop-out rates and term test results
have been analysed for the Ambunti community school only up to the end of
1992 There are many problems with gathenng thesefiguresbecause some results
have been lost and some teachers have left the school without leaving their
records behind Sufficient results are available so far for three 'streams' of com-
munity school students
Stream 1 those who began Grade 1 in 1988,
Stream 2 those who began Grade 1 in 1989,
Stream 3 those who began Grade 1 in 1990
For Stream 1, complete records are available only for 1988, 1990, and 1992
(Grades 1, 3, and 5), the 1989 and 1991 records are missing For Stream 2,
94 PIDGIN IN FORMAL EDUCATION

Table 2 Drop-outs at the Ambunti Community School

No prep (%) Ex prep (%)

Stream 1 (1988-1990) 6/22 (27 3) 2/14 (14 3)

Stream2(1989-1991) 9/16 (56 2) 0/11 (0 0)
Stream 3 (1990-1992) 17/41 (415) 6/31 (194)

complete records are available for 1989,1991, and 1992 (Grades 1,3, and 4), the
1990 records are missing for one of the two classes For Stream 3, complete
records are available for 1990,1991, and 1992 (Grades 1,2, and 3)
Drop-out rates between Grade 1 and Grade 3 have been calculated for all
streams (discounting transfers) In each case, the rate for the 'ex prep' students
was lower than for the 'no prep' students, as shown in Table 2

ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT
The statistical analysis of the data on academic achievement employed a multi-
vanate quasi-experimental design involving three dependent variables and two
possibly relevant influencing factors The dependent measures were the final
term test scores for English, Maths, and General Subjects, all of which were
standardized The first possible influencing factor was whether the students
attended the prep-school program (prep-school) or not (no prep-school) The
second factor was time, indicated by measurement occasions three different
grades for each stream
The means and standard deviations for the standardized scores are given in
Tables 3, 4, and 5 and Figures 1, 2, and 3 (Note that the numbers here include
only the non-drop-outs for whom all results were available for the three mea-
surement occasions) There was a significant multivanate main effect for prep-
school attendance for each of the streams, accounting for 54 per cent of
between-subjects variance for Stream 1, 30 3 per cent for Stream 2, and 26 per
cent for Stream 3 ' This means that, overall, children who had been involved in
the prep-school program scored significantly higher, not lower, in term tests
than those who had not been involved Importantly, the higher achievements
were in English, as well as in Maths and General Subjects Therefore, the null
hypothesis can be rejected as well as Hi, the prediction that students who learned
in Melanesian Pidgin would actually do worse, especially in English because of
negative transfer
Furthermore, the multivanate effect for measurement occasion (time) was not
significant in any stream 2 In other words, on the basis of the test scores, the
prep-school children continued to show significantly higher academic achieve-
ment across time The differences between the groups over time were consistent
for all subjects m all the grades, with the exception of Maths in Grade 4 for
Stream 2 3 There is no explanation for this anomaly, but it does not alter the over-
all result that the effect of two extra years of schooling was not significantly
96 PIDGIN IN FORMAL EDUCATION

Table 4 Stream 2—means and standard deviations (standardized scores)

Grade 1 Grade 3 Grade 4

Ex prep English 0 53 (42) 0 47 (41) 046 (66)

n=9 Maths 0 51 (62) 0 77 (38) - 0 08 (82)
General Subjects 0 53 (64) - 0 003 (28) 0 15 (115)
No prep English - 0 29 (98) - 0 35 (116) -026 (109)
n=14 Maths - 0 29 (102) - 0 52 (97) 0 05 0 09)
General Subjects - 0 30 (94) - 0 02 (131) - 0 002 (86)

% English
X Maths
X General

Ex prep

Grade I Grade 3 Grade 4

Time period (grade)

Figure 2 Stream 2—means (standardized scores)

also they participate more in the classroom and have a lower drop-out rate than
the other students Teachers say theyfindtheir job easier when dealing with the
'ex prep' students because they are co-operative and quick learners The opinions
of parents and community leaders also contradict arguments that using a
pidgin in formal education is a waste of time The dramatic increase in the
number of Tok Pisin prep-schools is a clear indication that communities view
them as advantageous for their children Even English-educated people who
may have considered Tok Pisin to be just a degenerate language have begun to
enrol their children in the prep-schools
Of course, it may be that it is simply the one or two years of extra education, not
the learning of initial literacy in Tok Pisin, that gives the ex prep students the
advantage After all, they arnve at the commumty schools already well-adjusted
 JEFF SIEGEL 97

Table 5 Stream 3—means and standard deviations (standardized scores)

Grade 1 Grade 2 Grade 3

Ex prep English 0 41 (104) 046 (61) 0 21 (94)

n=ll Maths 0 47 (83) 040 (77) 0 36 (92)
General Subjects 0 27 (83) 0 51 (48) 040 (77)
No prep English - 0 48 (89) - 0 19 (104) - 0 12 (93)
n = 13 Maths - 0 56 (95) - 0 26 (100) - 0 32 (78)
General Subjects - 0 40 (106) - 0 22 (96) - 0 37 (107)

Figure 3 Stream 3—means (standardizedscores)

to the formal education system, and already possessing some academic skills The
obvious question is whether using English in prep-schools would not produce
similar or even better results This is an interesting theoretical question, but in
practice it is not relevant to places such as the Ambunti Distnct There are not
enough English-educated people and educational resources in the communities
to run English-medium prep-schools Thus, in many developing countries one
crucial advantage of community-based pre-school programs using widely
known local languages, such as Tok Pisin, is merely their feasibility
However, in Ambunti, the fact that the effect of the extra years of education in
Tok Pisin is not neutralized over time, and that the 'ex prep' students continue
to out-perform the 'no prep' students in the upper grades, may indicate that
there are advantages specifically associated with the use of Tok Pisin in the
98 PIDGrN IN FORMAL EDUCATION

prep-schools Many sources, such as the 1953 UNESCO report on the use of ver-
nacular languages in education (UNESCO 1968) have emphasized the educa-
tional, social, and psychological benefits of starting school in a familiar
language Another advantage may be related to the factor of perceived distance
between languages, mentioned earlier, and the close relationship between Tok
Pisin and its lexifier, English In his study of the use of a Creole in formal educa-
tion in Australia, Murtagh (1982) shows that students in a bilingual program
using English and their mother tongue, Knol (Northern Temtory Creole), had
greater English-language proficiency than Knol-speaking students in a mono-
lingual English program He attributes these results to the bilingual program
students' 'progressively greater success at separating the two languages' as a
consequence of 'the two languages being taught as separate entities in the class-
room' It may be the separate teaching of Tok Pisin in the prep-schools and Eng-
lish in the community school has a similar advantageous effect
In conclusion, preliminary formal instruction in a pidgin language is clearly
better than none at all It may help children in adjusting to school, separating
the pidgin from its lexifier, and learning literacy skills which may be transferred
to the standard, and it will not be a hindrance to children's later academic
achievement
(Revised version received May 1996)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research was supported by grants from the Australian Research Council and the
Faculty of Arts of the University of New England Thanks go to Diane Arnott, Libby Fitz-
gerald, and Edward Wiruk for their assistance

NOTES
1
Streaml Wilkslambda= 45,MVF(3,12) = 4 72,/>= 021,Stream2 Wilkslambda =
66179, MVF (6,80) = 3 06, p = 01, Stream 3 Wilks lambda = 74094, MVF (3,26) =
303,/?= 047
2
Streaml p = 238, Steam 2 p= 986, Stream 3 p= 825
3
The multivanate interaction between prep-school attendance and measurement occa-
sion (time) was not significant for Stream 1 (p = 238) and Stream 3 (p - 55) However, it
was significant for Stream 2 (Wilks lambda = 66179,MVF(6,80) = 3 06,/J = 01),account-
mg for approximately 18 7 of the variance Post-hoc univanate F-tests revealed a signifi-
cant group difference for Maths only (F(2,42) = 7 669, p ~ 001, eta-squared = 268) To
determine the differences between the mean scores for Maths, a post-hoc Tukey's test was
conducted The prep-school group scored significantly higher than the no prep-school
group of Grade 3 only (HSD = 0 86), and there was a statistically insignificant difference
between the groups in Grade 4, with the no prep-school group scoring slightly higher

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