Micro-level planning for a Papua New Guinean elementary school classroom: “copycat” planning and language ideologies

Abstract

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.