Talking Story about Pidgin
Exploring the creole language of Hawai‘i
Talk Story about Pidgin
Check out Hawai‘i kine Pidgin
Materials for Educators

A Teacher’s Guide to
Talking Story about Language

Exploring Pidgin in English and Social Studies Classrooms

With support from the Hawai‘i Council for the Humanities, these educational materials were produced by members of Da Pidgin Coup and the Charlene J. Sato Center for Pidgin, Creole, and Dialect Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa to help high school English and Social Studies teachers across the state of Hawai‘i integrate discussions of Pidgin in lessons on history, literature, sociology, and personal expression.

Many of these materials make use of two documentaries about Pidgin, both produced in 2009:

Ha Kam Wi Tawk Pidgin Yet? – by Searider Productions, Wai‘anae High School
Pidgin: The Voice of Hawai‘i – Marlene Booth, director

You can download the entire Guide as a single PDF hereTeacher's Guide in PDF format

Lessons and activities

  1. Developing Language Awareness: Learning more about Pidgin
    1. Pidgin grammar quiz
    2. Pidgin grammar compared to English
    3. Dialect, accent, slang, and jargon
    4. Pidgin Can! Exploring what we do with Pidgin
    5. Pidgin in public
    6. Doing math in Pidgin
  2. Pidgin and the Language Arts Curriculum
    1. Class debates and discussions
    2. Orthography and Pidgin
    3. Grammar awareness activities
    4. The genre of autobiographical fiction (Lee Tonouchi’s Da Word)
    5. Media comprehension and interpretation (Pidgin in films)
    6. Vocabulary and concept development in Pidgin and English
    7. Pidgin-English codeswitching in literature (Alani Apio’s Kāmau)
  3. Pidgin and the Social Studies Curriculum
    1. Social relations on plantations: The origins of Pidgin
    2. Pidgin across the generations: Your linguistic family tree
    3. Language rights as Civil Rights: Pidgin goes to court
    4. Resistant histories, language and music: Braddah Iz
    5. Representations of Hawai‘i in hapa haole music