More Support for Educators to Teach English in Creole-Speaking Communities

A US$13,463 grant from American Friends of Jamaica (AFJ) will enable the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, to digitise and expand support to educators to effectively teach English in Creole-speaking communities, using a linguistics-based approach.

In the next six to nine months, the UWI will launch the Professional Development for Primary School Teachers (PDPST), providing access to free online training materials for the Language Arts curriculum in Jamaican primary schools.

The institution is among 54 that received funding totalling US$740,000 during the AFJ’s Grant Awards Ceremony at the United States Embassy in Kingston on April 8.

Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Education, Professor Silvia Kouwenberg, told JIS News that the programme was birthed years ago when former Education Minister, Ronald Thwaites, requested advice on how to tackle the problem of low literacy levels in primary schools.

It was piloted in 2015 and a second round of workshops were held in 2019.

“We recognise that teachers are prepared to teach Language Arts as if children speak English. That’s how they have been trained. So, although they acknowledge the presence of Jamaican Creole in their classrooms, they’re not trained in any way to work with Jamaican Creole,” Professor Kouwenberg noted.

“They don’t have any deep knowledge or explicit knowledge of the grammar of Jamaican Creole. They only have the implicit knowledge that a native speaker has and what then happens in the classrooms is that children who speak grammatical Jamaican Creole are treated as children who speak ungrammatical English because teachers do not have a choice. So, at the core, what we want is for teachers to become aware of this language situation and its implications,” she added.

Professor Kouwenberg underscored that an important implication is that teachers are not able to build on the knowledge that children already have.

She explained to JIS News that children come to the classroom speaking Jamaican Creole and that ought to be the stepping stone from which they are taught English but, instead, it ends up being treated as a hindrance.

Literacy specialist in the School of Education, Dr. Yewande Lewis-Fokum, shared that the teachers in Kingston and western Jamaica who participated in the workshops valued it.

“They saw the relevance of the content and the pedagogy. It allowed them to reflect on their own language journeys and their own knowledge of the different systems of a language, the sound, the phonology, the morphology, the syntax and the semantics,” she said.

Dr. Lewis-Fokum shared that one school reported that the reading comprehension strategies that were utilised with read alouds and directed reading thinking activity, helped their students to improve in the Grade Four Literacy Test.

Meanwhile, PhD Candidate specialising in educational linguistics, Sashann Dixon, who participated in the second round of workshops, shared that the teachers were very enthusiastic about the project and the content.

“I remember very clearly them expressing a joy to just be able to see the difference between the languages, some of which internally they already made notes of; some of the things that happened in the classroom, but they don’t have the linguistic tools to really carry that in the classroom and use it to their advantage,” she told JIS News.

Meanwhile, Professor Kouwenberg reasoned that some teachers found the face-to-face workshop series to be quite challenging due to the volume of new information being introduced and that formed the basis of their application to the AFJ for a grant to transform the programme into a set of online workshops.

This, she said, will promote self-paced learning and can also be used for professional training workshops, where one topic is explored at a time.

Professor Kouwenberg thanked AFJ for the grant, noting that it is critical for the materials to be accessible to all primary teachers, as “every time there is a report that talks about literacy, it is scathing about the learning outcomes”.