Sato Distinguished Lecture: Fiona Willans on Bislama in Educational Contexts

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In this lecture titled "Hem i Broken English nomo: Interrupting the same old story about pidgins and creoles in school," Dr. Fiona Willans (University of the South Pacific) will discuss the role of Bislama (an English-based expanded pidgin) in educational contexts of Vanuatu. Pidgins and creoles have a long tradition of stigmatisation within formal education, and very little has changed in this regard, despite several decades of sociolinguistic research demonstrating that there is no linguistic justification for keeping these languages out of the classroom. Dr. Willans's presentation uses recent data about Bislama collected at two schools in Vanuatu to demonstrate that attitudes towards this language remain incredibly negative in the domain of formal education, despite its high status outside school, and despite its prominent place in teachers’ and students’ linguistic repertoires. She will suggest that these negative arguments can be countered in a number of ways, but that it is difficult to open up sufficient space to disrupt the status quo without rethinking some of our fundamental assumptions about the nature of language and languages. The presentation will consider whether it is possible to shift our thinking from deficit to difference to repertoire, as a way of validating Bislama as part of a complex teaching and learning repertoire.

Event Sponsor
Charlene J. Sato Center for Pidgin, Creole, and Dialect Studies, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Christina Higgins, (808) 956-8610, cmhiggin@hawaii.edu

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