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Speakers of creole languages experience educational disadvantage in schools that teach in the standard language of their region, but there remain many misconceptions about why this is the case and how best to facilitate academic improvement, despite research demonstrating that actively using creoles in the classroom leads to a range of positive outcomes for these students. This paper reviews how attitudes towards creoles influence their place in educational contexts, some of the challenges for research on creoles in education, approaches to teaching creole‐speaking children with particular reference to bilingual programs, and the ramifications of standardized testing for creole‐speaking students.

Oceanic languages are often described as preferring primary stress on penultimate syllables, but detailed surveys show that many different types of prominence patterns have been reported across and within Oceanic language families. In some cases, these interact with segmental and phonotactic factors, such as syllable weight. The range of Oceanic prominence patterns is exemplified across Vanuatu, a linguistically diverse archipelago with over 130 languages. However, both impressionistic and instrumentally-based descriptions of prosodic patterns and their correlates are limited for languages of this region. This paper investigates prominence in Nafsan, an Oceanic language of Vanuatu for which previous observations of prominence differ. Acoustic and durational results for disyllabic and trisyllabic Nafsan words show a clear pattern of higher fundamental frequency values in final syllables, regardless of vowel length, pointing towards a preference for prominence at the right edge of words. Short vowels also show centralisation in penultimate syllables, providing supporting evidence for right-edge prominence and informing the understanding of vowel deletion processes in Nafsan. V

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There are now significant numbers of children who speak a language other than English when they enter the formal school system in Australia. Many of these children come from a language background that is entirely different from the school language. Many Indigenous children, however, come from creole-speaking backgrounds where their home language may share features with the school language whilst remaining substantially different in other ways. What often makes this situation more challenging is the tendency to view creole, rather than as a different language, as a kind of deficient version of the standard language. Children entering the school system with a creole thus often encounter considerable difficulties. In addition, teachers who are not trained in teaching creole-speaking children may not recognise these difficulties. This paper explores some of these issues in the Australian context with reference to home languages such as Kriol and Torres Strait Creole (TSC) as well as minority dialects such as Australian Aboriginal English (AAE), and discusses possible resolutions.

We present an exploratory analysis of several long-term distributional measures of f0 range in the speech of universityeducated speakers of Indian English from four L1 backgrounds (Telugu, Tamil, Hindi and Bengali). The aim of this study is to investigate the degree of homogeneity in Indian English prosody and any similarities between the speakers' productions in English and their L1. Following recent studies, we examine three aspects of f0 range: pitch level (relative height of habitual f0), pitch span and pitch dynamism. Overall, across varieties, pitch level measures reveal individual speaker differences and only weak L1 effects on max f0 and median f0. Some speakers show higher f0 in their L1 productions compared to their English productions. More robust patterns were found for pitch span and dynamism: for all measures (maximum-minimum f0, pitch dynamism quotient and standard deviation), significant differences were found between L1 and English (p<0.001) for Bengali and Telugu L1 speakers. The relative weakness of L1 effects would suggest a degree of homogeneity in Indian English, at least for the prosodic parameters investigated. Evidence of a shift in pitch span when talking in English, regardless of L1, further suggests a convergent speech variety.