Making Language Visible: Language Awareness in a Creole-speaking Environment

Beverley Bryan

Language awareness, as an essential component in language learning/teaching, has been variously defined and discussed in the literature on Language Education. This paper will explore some of these meanings and present the case for language awareness as a particularly useful and innovative concept for enriching language teaching and the teaching of English in a Creole-speaking environment. With a specific focus on using Jamaican Creole (JC) to teach English, this paper will take the form of a multi-media presentation foregrounding instances of good classroom practice in Jamaican schools.

/laik yu nu waan mi pikni fi laan di waitmaan langwij !/ or Creole, without Controversy, in West Indian Education

Dennis Craig

Linguists have often assumed the role of activists for creole-language literacy. The justification for such activism is examined. In this context, the growth of tolerance for cultural, including linguistic, differences has to be taken into account. Is the self-identity and self-esteem of the Caribbean creole speaker still under threat, as it was, say, fifty years ago? Undoubtedly there is still a need for continued public education in the latter respect, but is it possible that linguistic activism has served its purpose? The attitudes of homes and communities are seen as determinants of the kinds of educational action that are possible. These attitudes have to be currently evaluated against the background of relatively rapid linguistic change in contemporary times, globalisation, and the individual's ever-increasing need for literacy in a world language. In this context, while continuity of cognitive growth in one's first language remains critically important, the use of one's first language in education can justifiably assume different forms. This fact has been known for some time, but it has a new urgency in the present-day world. For Caribbean creole-speaking populations, what continues to be appropriate is that primary and secondary schools should have a range of creole-utilisation procedures, from which selection can be made, and that can be used flexibly and in varying ways, depending on sociolinguistic conditions, to optimise children's education. The paper concludes with an outline of some creole-utilisation possibilities.

Bringing Language Awareness into the High School Curriculum: The Opportunities Offered by CAPE Communication Studies

Silvia Kouwenberg

The introduction of the CAPE syllabus "Communication Studies" in Jamaican high schools has been greeted with mixed reactions. In many schools, the course is taught by teachers who are either not qualified to teach all aspects of the programme and/or not interested in doing so, but even those teachers who like the course, have pointed out that they need support and possibly retraining for the "Language in Society" module. This module focusses on aspects of grammar of Creole vernaculars as compared to English on the one hand, on the linguistic situations in Caribbean territories and their historical background on the other hand.

An invitation extended to final year linguistics students in L32B Creole Linguistics at UWI Mona during the second semester of 2000-01 to assist in filling this gap was enthusiastically taken up. It resulted in four groups of three students each developing a lesson plan for a topic in the comparative analysis of Jamaican Creole and English and piloting their lessons at a Kingston high school. After compiling and editing the material, it was distributed to high schools across the island, and used as a basis for training high school teachers, both in individual schools and in a training session at UWI which involved teachers from schools island-wide. An evaluation form came back with positive feedback and requests for further training. The lesson plans are now used in schools across Jamaica, and teachers have generally expressed appreciation for the material, in particular for its explicit guidance through the topics.

The topics covered in the material are: (1) the comparative analysis of the vocabulary of Jamaican Creole and English; (2) the comparative analysis of pluralization in Jamaican Creole and English; (3) the comparative analysis of consonants and their combinations in Jamaican Creole and English; (4) the comparative analysis of tense marking in Jamaican Creole and English. Each lesson plan contains a background section which aims to familiarize the teachers with the topic at hand, a step-by-step lesson plan, and worksheets intended for reproduction and distribution to students.

We see this development as a prime opportunity for developing language awareness issues which are specific to the Caribbean situation in the high school curriculum. It is important that this opportunity be used properly, so as not to give high school teachers, many of whom are not devoid of the common prej-udices towards Creole vernaculars, a chance to per-petuate inappropriate attitudes among their students. This paper will present an overview of the material which we developed. The aims of the presentation are to initiate a discussion on the appropriateness of the material for high school use, its possible expansion to include other topics for which lesson plans can be produced, and the possibility for the development of similar materials for use in different situations across the Caribbean territories in which CAPE Com-munication Studies is taught.

Bringing Creole into the Classroom: Views from Outside the Caribbean

Jeff Siegel

Until fairly recently, creole languages have had no official place in the formal education systems of the countries where they are spoken. While this situation has been changing in several areas, the status quo seems to remain in most of the standard English/Creole-speaking parts of the Caribbean region. This paper examines developments in the use of creole languages in formal education in other areas of the world. First, it outlines the usual arguments for keeping creoles and nonstandard dialects out of the classroom - especially the fear of interference. Then, it presents three types of education programs which actually utilise these varieties - instrumental, accommodation and awareness - and describes examples of each from Australia, the Seychelles, Hawai'i, Britain and other parts of the world. The paper goes on to discuss evaluations of some of these programs, which show that they are successful in improving overall academic achievement as well as performance in the standard dialect. The paper concludes with some possible explanations for the success of these programs from the perspective of research in second language acquisition.

The Effects of Vernacular Instruction on the Development of Bi-literacy Abilities of Native Speakers of French Creole

Hazel Simmons-McDonald

Research on vernacular literacy using native speakers of a pidgin as subjects (e.g. Siegel, 1997, 1999) shows that the use of vernacular can be a help and not a hindrance to the development of literacy in Standard English. The use of Creoles and vernaculars as media of instruction has been resisted in the Caribbean for several reasons, a primary one being the fear that such instruction might simply reinforce the Creole without necessarily resulting in the development of proficiency in Standard English. Findings such as those reported in the Siegel studies are unlikely to have been reproduced in sources that are accessible to policy makers or teacher educators. As a consequence, they have not been considered in discussions on this issue locally, and they have had no influence on educational policy or pedagogical practice in the Caribbean.

This paper presents the results of one component of a preliminary pilot study which implemented a model for developing multi-literacy among first language French Creole and English-lexicon vernacular speakers in St. Lucia. The sub-sample on which this report is based comprises three children, two boys and one girl, from Grades V and VI of a primary school in St. Lucia. At the start of the study one boy (Grade VI) was found to be reading at an early Grade I level, while the other boy and the girl (Grade V) were beginning readers with minimal decoding and fluency abilities. The three children had received six (in the case of the 5th graders) and seven (in the case of the 6th grader) years of instruction at the primary school where the study was conducted.

The "preliminary pilot" study implemented a slightly modified version of the first component of the model, which was designed to develop bi-literacy in French Creole and Standard English. The time which the full-scale model required was reduced to the equivalent of a four week long intensive course with sessions conducted at different periods to facilitate application of the intervention by the researchers. A single subject research design was used for the study to control for intervening variables that might have influenced the outcomes. The findings from the first phase of the study showed that all the children in the sub-sample were reading at least one grade level higher (in Standard English) than at the start of the study. All the children also learned to read French Creole during the intervention and their comprehension of texts in English was much enhanced by their developing abilities in reading French Creole. The study found a positive transfer of reading abilities from the native to the second language. It therefore corroborates findings of studies done elsewhere, namely, that instruction in the child's native language can be a help and not a hindrance to the development of literacy in the L2. The results of this experiment will be discussed within the broader context of the multi-literacy model and its implications for policy as well as its potential usefulness for pedagogical practice will be explored.