Language Education in the Caribbean: Selected Articles by Dennis Craig

By Zellynne Jennings

Dennis Roy Craig (1929–2004) was one of the most outstanding Caribbean linguists of the twentieth century. The Society of Caribbean Linguistics honoured him in 2000 for what was described as “an academic career at once awesome and inspiring”, for his devotion to Creole linguistics and his tremendous contribution to language education in the Caribbean. He was also an outstanding figure in educational leadership in the region and a poet.

In this collection, eight of Craig’s most representative articles have been chosen to demonstrate his understanding of the language situation in the English-official Caribbean and the breadth of his vision in relation to the spheres of language teaching and language learning in the English-based Creole speaking societies. Although most of these articles were written between the 1970s and the 1990s, the problems and issues that they treat are what we continue to face in the twenty-first century. Language Education in the Caribbean will prove useful to language teachers, creolists, and practitioners and researchers in the field of Caribbean language education.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of the West Indies Press
• Release date: Dec 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9789766405403

Book preview

Dennis Roy Craig (1929–2004) was one of the most outstanding Caribbean linguists of the twentieth century, a noted creolist and also a seminal figure in the field of language education in the English-official Caribbean. Apart from this, Craig was also a distinguished figure in educational leadership in the region. He was vice dean and head of the teaching section (1975–77 and 1982–82) in the School of Education on the Mona campus (Jamaica) of the University of the West Indies. He was also the university dean of the Faculty of Education of the three campuses of the University of the West Indies (1982–85), director of the National Centre for Educational Resource Development in the Ministry of Education, Guyana (1988–91) and, subsequently, the vice-chancellor of the University of Guyana (1991–95), filling all of these roles in his traditional calm and cool, though firm and decisive manner, and piercingly perceptive in his ­insightfulness when it came to assessing situations and making decisions.

However, it is with his contribution as a linguist, particularly to language education in the Commonwealth Caribbean with which this book is concerned, and to that end, eight of his most representative articles have been chosen for this volume. The intention here is to demonstrate Craig’s deep commitment to, and understanding of the language situation in the English-official Caribbean and the breadth of his vision in relation to the spheres of language teaching and language learning in the English-based Creole-speaking societies of the ­Commonwealth Caribbean.

The fact is that although most of these articles were written between the 1970s and the 1990s, much of the material that they deal with and the problems and issues that were identifiable during those decades have hardly changed although we are now in the twenty-first century. This state of affairs bears testimony to Craig’s amazing grasp of the nature of the factors involved in the teaching and learning of language in Creole-speaking communities. It is hoped that this book will prove useful not only to language teachers but also to creolists as well as to practitioners and researchers in the field of Caribbean language education.

The articles that have been chosen are the following: Education and Creole English in the West Indies: Some Sociolinguistic Factors (1971), Bidialectal Education: Creole and Standard in the West Indies (1976), Reading and the Creole Speaker (1978), The Sociology of Language Learning and Teaching in a Creole Situation (1978), Creole and Standard: Partial Learning, Base Grammar and the Mesolect (1978), English Language Teaching: Problems and Prospects in the West Indies (1988), A Creole English Continuum and the Theory of Grammar (1980) and finally Creolistics and Education (1990).

The articles follow a chronological order and begin at the point where Craig identifies and explains the factors that impact on the language situation in the officially English-speaking Caribbean. The articles Education and ­Creole ­English in the West Indies, Creole and Standard, Bidialectal Education, English Language Teaching, Reading and the Creole Speaker and The Sociology of Language Learning and Teaching in a Creole Situation all focus on issues highly pertinent to the language situation in the officially English-­speaking Caribbean and the sociolinguistic factors which influence language use, language learning and language teaching.

Creole as the Majority Language of the English-official Caribbean

First of all, Craig points out that that English-based Creole is the everyday language of the majority in the territories of the English-official Caribbean and that the basic features of English-based Creoles are very similar, and second, that the social structure of the territories involved is also similar because of the imposition of colonization and plantation slavery that took place in the ­seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Consequently, although most of the articles deal largely with speakers of Jamaican Creole (JC), the findings as reported by Craig in relation to the sociolinguistic features he identifies therein are relevant to the territories of the English-official Caribbean in general.

Interaction Area, Interlanguage, Mesolect

In addition, Craig points out that there is an interaction area between the Creole and the Standard, intermediate between the two extremes of the continuum as defined for Jamaica by Bailey and Cassidy, whereby a third level is produced by mixing and what he terms mutation with mixing, the latter in particular reflecting the complex social relationships that underlie it. It is the same interaction area that is referred to in some of the other articles, such as Creole and Standard, when he refers to that mid-level area as the mesolect, and interlanguage and points out that the variety being discussed is neither the Creole nor the Standard. The importance of language use to social mobility is shown to be crucial as is the fact that the language situation in the officially English-­speaking Caribbean is closely interwoven with its social and economic development. Craig also illustrates the socially important contrasts at the phonological level and the lack of understanding demonstrated by the educational authorities who are incapable of producing creative and informed language policies that would improve the level of performance by the students in Standard English, which is the desired goal of English-teaching in all the territories.

He goes on to discuss the consequences of language teaching to children to whom English is neither a native nor a foreign language, that the majority of these children are far more capable of recognizing Standard English than of producing it and added, to make the argument more current, that the explosion of the Internet, text messaging and other similar communications media only compound the problem. Craig then looks in greater detail at a sample of Creole-­speaking children in Jamaica and Trinidad who were tested on their learning of structural patterns to measure their rate of acquisition of the Standard in relation to the attitudes to the language. There is also an attempt on his part to differentiate between genders, as he looked at the results of boys versus girls in the production of standard speech involving verb phrases. These results showed that boys tended to produce fewer standard verb patterns than girls, although initially, there was little difference, but he perceived that the attitudes of the boys towards producing correct standard speech was that it was somewhat ­sissyish to produce that kind of language, whereas the girls were more aware of the social prestige attached to correct speech.

Restricted versus Elaborated Code

Most of the articles cited look at the language situation and the syntactic structuring on the part of Creole-speaking children in the English-official Caribbean against the theory of restricted versus elaborated code as put forward by Basil Bernstein in his research into sociolinguistic factors that applied in the case of the language production of British children. Craig did his own experiments with Jamaican children and was able to conclude that there are three types of difference between restricted and elaborated codes, such as those between discrete morpho-syntactic systems, difference in use within the context of speech and differences in cognitive orientation. He recognized the fact that the dialectal differences in the English-official Caribbean would impact more on their production of language than they would in the case of English working-class children among whom there are no such sharply defined differences, so that the learning of linguistic conventions would help the latter group to produce language that is nearer to the elaborated code than the Caribbean Creole-speaking children. He felt that the cognitive purposes to which language is applied and which would include not only morpho-syntactic, but also semantic variables would create difficulties for the learning of the Standard on the part of Creole-speaking children. That fact had not really been taken into consideration previously, but at the time of his writing was now beginning to be recognized in the work of Katz and Fodor (1964), Chomsky (1965) and also by Rickford (1974), who pointed out that African American Vernacular English (AAVE) shows similarities with Caribbean English Creoles as they certainly had an impact on the development of AAVE, given the historical conditions ­prevailing at the time when that ­variety was being shaped.

Issues Arising in the Teaching of Standard English

Another of Craig’s concerns in the articles is that although the presence of a language continuum between the Creole and the Standard in the English-official Caribbean leads to an educational situation that is virtually bidialectal, and his contention that such a situation needs more than merely teaching the standard dialect without interfering with the child’s home dialect, educational authorities refuse to see the point and to produce language policies that would address the issue. In Bidialectal Education and English Language Teaching he refers to the persistence on the part of teachers in teaching English by correction, which results from there being no educational use of Creole or Creole-­influenced language in the education systems of the territories under discussion. An alternative to this teaching by correction is of course Velma Pollard’s From Jamaican Creole to Standard English ([1988] 2003), which proposes a comparative approach between the two varieties in a creative way and suggests viable and valuable activities that can be used to make the comparative approach more meaningful to students.

Having broached this question, Craig points out via examples of two types of mesolectal speech, taken from Rickford, that it is relatively easy for Creole speakers to get to a mesolectal level, but they find it difficult to move beyond that, and he also shows why nonstandard speakers who are at a similar mesolectal level tend to remain there. Of course, this is because there is great similarity between the semantic and syntactic strategies performed by the learner in the Creole and in the mesolect, but then new strategies are required for the move from the mesolect to the Standard.

We might therefore assume that the structure of conceptual knowledge is the same for all human beings and also that language is a means of labelling concepts. Such assumptions lead to the conclusion that conceptual and linguistic knowledge of speakers in relation to any meaningful segment of language are related and have a general structure, as set out in diagram 8 in Creole and Standard. The diagram suggests that concepts occurring in the mind might possibly be given one-on-one lexical and syntactic labels simultaneously, which would constitute the first level of language, so sentence output here would be at the simplest lexical and syntactic level. Thereafter would come transformational processes involving the movement, deletion and grouping of already theoretically existing labels and the relabelling (lexicalization) of the grouped meanings would lead successively to more and more complex levels of syntax from Level 2 to whatever level the individual could manage.

The crux of the argument just set out is that the Creole is both lexically and syntactically simpler than the standard because the Creole is output made at an earlier level than standard language is. Nevertheless, conceptually, cognitively or semantically, the two types of language stem from the same base before and at Level 1. This fact has not been understood by the proponents of theories of linguistic and cognitive deficit in regard to speakers of non-standard languages, pidgins or Creoles or lower social class speakers generally. Craig’s proposition is that there is a base grammar of every language and that the base grammar is the same for all languages. After Level 1, all languages would increase in grammatical complexity as they develop but each language could also adopt its own grammatical and lexical alternatives peculiar to itself, which would account both for grammatical diversity and grammatical similarity between languages. This is an interesting theory that is primarily developmental and moves away from the deficit theories that were proposed during the time of Craig’s