Language-in-education policies in the South pacific: some possibilities for consideration

Abstract

[Abstract]: Language-in-education policies in the South Pacific have arisen out of historical circumstances of the countries and have been largely de facto 'policies' that have tended to emphasise a metropolitan high status language to the comparative neglect of the development of the indigenous languages. This paper discusses research related to bilingual education as a means of providing background information for policy makers, and then discusses a number of bilingual education models. With this background, the paper then suggests separate models of language-in-education policies for the Melanesian, Micronesian/Polynesian parts of the South Pacific and for Fiji. It concludes with a suggestion how such poicy making might proceed so that both costs and fear of the new can be contained.