Language use and the instructional strategies of Grade 3 teachers to support ‘bridging’ in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

For over a decade, the Department of Education in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has adopted vernacular education as a way of ensuring that the educational experiences of children in schools draw on the cultural and linguistic knowledge they bring to the classroom. In PNG, there are many potential vernaculars – apart from the local languages, there are Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu. The policy advocates ‘bridging’ as an instructional strategy. While the term is used extensively by teachers, it is unclear what teachers think it entails and how they enact bridging. This small-scale exploratory study documents the views of a group of Grade 3 teachers in the East New Britain region and provides observations of their bridging strategies. While the teachers are not particularly supportive of vernacular education, they report on and use instructional strategies that include translation, metalinguistic comparison, contrast and elaboration. The teachers make much use of elicitation to encourage children to articulate their understanding of English, and they demonstrate flexible and dynamic use of languages in their classrooms. The fact that the study recorded no use of the local languages suggests that systematic follow-up of policy in practice is much needed, together with more in-depth research.

Keywords:

• multilingual education
• vernacular literacies
• bilingual teachers
• classroom dialogue
• codeswitching

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade Aid Programme in awarding the second author a postgraduate study award.

Notes

‘Vernacular’ in the Department of Education policy refers to one of the many indigenous languages, or the lingua francas, Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu.

This is expressed in terms of decreased percentage use of the vernacular – from 60% to 50% then 30% percent, respectively, in Grades 3–5.

The term Tolai is sometimes used interchangeably with Kuanua. However, strictly speaking it is a term used for a cultural group, not the language.