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Creolese and a language education policy</h1><div class="gmail-article-meta"><h5>
<span class="gmail-byline gmail-author">By <span><a href="https://www.stabroeknews.com/author/layout/" title="Posts by Staff Writer" rel="author">Staff Writer</a></span></span>
<time class="gmail-dateline" datetime="2018-05-07T02:01:25-04:00">9 hours ago</time></h5><div class="gmail-share-bar gmail-article-meta-share">
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<figure class="gmail-hero-image gmail-wp-caption"><div class="gmail-large-featured">
<a href="https://s1.stabroeknews.com/images/2018/05/20130304diaspora.jpg"><img src="https://s1.stabroeknews.com/images/2018/05/20130304diaspora.jpg" class="gmail-size-large gmail-loading"></a></div>
</figure><div class="gmail-article-body"><p><strong><a href="https://s1.stabroeknews.com/images/2013/03/20130304diaspora.jpg"><img class="gmail-alignleft gmail-size-full gmail-wp-image-229671 gmail-loading" src="https://s1.stabroeknews.com/images/2013/03/20130304diaspora.jpg" alt="" width="216" height="121"></a>Tamirand De Lisser, Hubert Devonish, Rhonda Jeffrey and Charlene Wilkinson</strong></p><p><em><strong>Tamirand Nnena De Lisser</strong>
is a Lecturer of Linguistics at the University of Guyana. Her main
research topic is the L1 acquisition of Jamaican Creole Syntactic
Systems. Her research interests include language acquisition, creole
linguistics, and applied linguistics; <strong>Hubert Devonish</strong>
is a retired professor of linguistics at the University of the West
Indies, currently Coordinator of the Jamaican Language Unit, UWI, Mona.
He is also an external member of the Guyanese Languages Unit Working
Group coordinated from the University of Guyana; <strong>Rhonda Jeffrey</strong>
is a current student in the Faculty of Education and Humanities at the
University of Guyana, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Education. She
works as a primary school teacher in an indigenous village in Guyana; <strong>Charlene</strong> <strong>Wilkinson</strong>
is a lecturer in the Department of Language and Cultural Studies at the
University of Guyana and a founder member of the Guyanese Languages
Unit Working Group.</em></p><div class="gmail-in-article"><div class="gmail-in-article-wrapper"> </div></div><p>Is
Creolese the national language of Guyana? And what role should it play
in the education system? A heated public debate on these questions has
taken place in the media recently. There have been interesting comments
from the usual suspects on both sides of the argument. The four writers
of this article join hands across the university hierarchy and across
three generations, to add their voices.</p><p>We begin with a glimpse
into a testimony of verbal interaction in a 21st century primary school
in Guyana inhabited by ordinary Guyanese children and their teacher:</p><p>“I
was teaching a grade 6 class at a school in the village that I live in.
I don’t remember the subject but I know it was not English. One of my
pupils was not paying attention, so after some time I decided to ask him
a question based on what I was teaching. His response was, ‘Mis mi na
noo.’ The instant he said those words, I echoed them in a tone loud
enough for the class next door to hear. There was loud laughter from the
pupils. Some of them even repeated what the boy said. In my village
they would say, ‘Mis, mi een noo.’ As far as they were concerned, he was
using the ‘wrong’ language. As far as I, the teacher, was concerned, he
was not speaking ‘proper English.’</p><p>The child’s face was flushed
with embarrassment as he sat quietly and did not utter another word for
the remainder of the session. Realizing what I had done, I felt ashamed
of it. To make matters worse, I decided to have a ‘speak properly time’.
If anyone wanted to say anything during that fifteen minute period,
they had to use ‘proper grammar’ in carefully constructed sentences. For
that entire period, my class was in absolute silence. They didn’t even
want to ask to use the washroom or have some water. One boy attempted to
speak but was laughed at every time because what he said seemed so
funny and wrong to them.</p><p>In my first year at the University of
Guyana, I took a course, ‘Language Education for Primary School
Teachers’. My lecturer was one of the writers of this article. The
course fostered a greater appreciation for the dialects (varieties) of
Creolese in Guyana and developed my language awareness. I came to even
greater understanding of Guyana as a country rich in cultural and
linguistic diversity. I came to appreciate my first language more, and
to begin to think about a different approach to teaching. The fact that
children speak as everyone in their community speaks no longer presented
itself as a problem, but as a cultural resource.”</p><div class="gmail-in-article"><div class="gmail-in-article-wrapper"> </div></div><p>Reading
Allsopp, we learned that we (teachers) and our pupils should be allowed
to use our mother tongue in school and that the system should take into
consideration that we are a Creole-speaking nation. How indeed, could
learning take place if we do not have freedom of speech? We would not
want to share our opinions, ask questions and make meaningful inputs.</p><p>Still,
many of our foremost educational leaders still continue to exhort
Guyanese parents to get their children to speak and write ‘correct
English’ as though completely oblivious to the fact that, for a large
sector of the Guyanese population, English is not the home language.</p><p>Let
us assume that teachers can and do maintain English as the sole
language medium they use in the class. Such minimal exposure to English
in classroom is unlikely to develop competence in English for a child
who spends the bulk of his or her waking hours in a Guyanese
environment. Members of a family or of a community speak a language
which is most effective for communicating with those around them. There
are very few communities in Guyana where English could perform this
role. For any educator to blame members of a community who do not
choose their speech forms for children’s failure to perform in English
is as pointless as King Canute cursing the sea for not obeying his
exhortation to come no further.</p><p><strong>WHAT DOES UNESCO SAY?</strong></p><p>UNESCO
recommends that “at least six years of mother tongue instruction is
needed to reduce learning gaps for minority language speakers (our
emphasis)”. The term ‘minority’ here is telling. It is usually minority
groups whose languages are not used in schools and who find that their
languages are discriminated against. Ironically, in Guyana, it is the
vast majority that speaks either Guyanese Creole or an indigenous
language, or both, and the minority that has control of English. But it
is the majority that experiences linguistic discrimination in their own
country. It should be obvious that this discrimination is therefore far
more unacceptable than that meted out to Guyanese abroad.</p><div class="gmail-in-article"><div class="gmail-in-article-wrapper"> </div></div><div class="gmail-in-article"><div class="gmail-in-article-wrapper"> <ins class="gmail-adsbygoogle gmail-inarticledesktop" style="width:300px;height:250px"><ins id="gmail-aswift_0_expand" style="display:inline-table;border:medium none;height:250px;margin:0px;padding:0px;width:300px;background-color:transparent"><ins id="gmail-aswift_0_anchor" style="display:block;border:medium none;height:250px;margin:0px;padding:0px;width:300px;background-color:transparent"></ins></ins></ins> </div></div><p><strong>THE JAMAICAN EXAMPLE</strong></p><p>The
Bilingual Education Project (BEP), run by the Jamaican Language Unit in
Jamaican primary schools, pioneered the implementation of an approach
which uses both English and Jamaican, alongside each other, as 1)
languages for teaching and learning literacy, 2) mediums of oral
instruction and classroom interaction, 3) subjects and 4) mediums for
teaching and learning content subjects.</p><p>Implementation took place
in 2004-2008 for a cohort of children moving from grades one to four in
that time period. The BEP had the official blessings of the Ministry of
Education and sought to demonstrate to the ministry as well as parents
and the public, that the option was indeed practical and doable. The
project had completing university students in linguistics translate the
school textbooks into Jamaican.</p><p>A training programme was run for
teachers to deliver lessons in both Jamaican and English, and to use the
textbook material in both languages. An important new skill teachers
had to acquire was familiarity with the Cassidy-JLU system for
representing the Jamaican language in writing. Teacher training took
place during the May-June period before implementation and during the
life of the project.</p><p><strong>THE HAITIAN EXAMPLE </strong></p><div class="gmail-in-article"><div class="gmail-in-article-wrapper"> </div></div><p>Ever
since the 1980s, Haitian Creole has been recognised in the Constitution
of Haiti as one of the two official languages of that country,
alongside French, and as the language which unites all Haitians. In the
period after the 2010 Haitian earthquake, Michel DeGraff, a Haitian
professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts of Technology (MIT) in the
USA got funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the USA
to pioneer Haitian Creole language medium education in Haiti and to
create online digital instructional materials for the teaching of
science, technology, engineering and mathematics in Haitian Creole. This
took place under what came to be known as the Haiti-MIT Initiative.</p><p>The
research conducted within the framework of the project established that
the use of the mother language produced children much better at their
content subjects than those who learnt them in French. The mother
language pupils were also superior in the learning of French.</p><p>This
research activity was followed by a formal agreement in mid-2015,
between the Haitian Ministry of National Education and the Haitian
Creole Academy, founded by Michel DeGraff, to introduce Haitian Creole
as the language of instruction throughout the education system and
throughout the country. The Haiti-MIT Initiative has been involved in
the training of teachers and the ongoing development of teaching
materials in support of the ‘creolisation’ of the Haitian education
system. The whole project has received overt statements of support from
perhaps the best known linguist in the world, even better known for his
political writing, Noam Chomsky, a colleague linguist of DeGraff at MIT.</p><p><strong>THE CURACAO EXAMPLE</strong></p><p>In
Curacao, Papiamentu, the local creole language, is an official
language, operating along with Dutch and English. Before 1970, Dutch,
the language of Curacao’s former colonisers, dominated as the language
used in education and Papiamentu was marginalised in the school context.
The then educational situation was strongly criticized. Local
Papiamentu-speaking children were being disadvantaged. in a system They
had to learn to read and write in Dutch, a language that the vast
majority of children did not speak. UNESCO analyzed the situation and
targeted the Dutch-medium as one of the main problems hampering the
students’ educational advancement. Though the inclusion of Papiamentu
was much opposed by educational institutions, speakers’ strong
identification with their native language caused support for its use in
the educational setting to grow. By the 1990s, the government of the
Netherlands Antilles of which Curaçao was then a part embarked on a
programme of mother tongue education introducing Papiamentu for literacy
and instruction in stages right up the education system. After the
dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles in the 2000s, the government of
Curaçao adopted the project and has continued the process of the spread
of Papiamentu across the education system.</p><div class="gmail-in-article"><div class="gmail-in-article-wrapper"> </div></div><p><strong>WHAT WILL BE THE GUYANESE EXAMPLE?</strong></p><p>We
have just presented three examples from other Caribbean territories of
educational approaches that take the majority language into
consideration. The still relatively new government of Guyana and the new
minister of education have a great opportunity to make a historic break
with emotional and anecdotal approaches to decision-making on language
education that can take us to a future of genuine and sustainable
economic and social development. Here is the opportunity to develop
home-grown solutions to education, based on solid research evidence, by
engaging with local and Caribbean expertise in devising a language
education policy that is appropriate to the language situation of
Guyana.</p></div>
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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