Creole speakers and standard language education

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.