Dear Editor,

I wish to thank you for your editorial of Saturday, November 26, "Let's be pragmatic about teaching in patois". To date this has been one of the most cogent media pieces on debate regarding Jamaican/English in schools.

For years many in this country have argued for English to remain the sole language of instruction. It seems that proponents of this argument have not realised that this approach has left us with lower proficiency in English, not to speak of the decreasing competence in other subjects taught in that language.

The extent to which teaching in English to predominanty Jamaican-speaking students affects performance on examinations set in English remains to be studied. But it would be surprising if it did not have a negative impact. If instruction in English worked as well as the English-only proponents argue, we would have seen, after all these years of using English as the sole language of instruction, more Jamaicans gaining access to the world through that language. Unfortunately, the records show otherwise.

As a teacher of language (English and French and at one time, Spanish), I have argued in the press and other fora for an approach to language education that appreciates languages as tools that aid in acquiring information and particular cognitive skills. Each language studied provides increased access to information and knowledge but also to the acquisition of a subsequent language. The refusal to recognise Jamaican as a tool through which our children may gain information about the world is tragic, not only because it devalues their primary means of accessing information, but also because it fails to appreciate the role of that language in the successful acquisition of their second, English.

Preoccupations about learning English alone do not make English speakers. The absurdity that the promotion of Jamaican will prevent Jamaican students from learning English is intellectual blackmail. It suggests that Jamaican students, unlike their counterparts in the rest of the world, innately lack the capacity to learn a second language because of the fact that they already speak another. This view has led to an arrogant language education practice that insists on our students accessing knowledge through a language that is not their own.

Linguistics tells us that any normal child, under the appropriate conditions, will learn any language. Let us look towards providing the appropriate conditions for our children to learn English rather than the persistent denigration of Jamaican. While exposure to English is one of the conditions for achieving proficiency in English, there is a difference between linguistic immersion and linguistic submersion.

Without the recognition of Jamaican and its structured use in at least the primary system, we produce students who struggle against the tide of English. When they get to the tertiary system, people like me have the joy (!) of attempting remediation. Alas, by then, it is too late. Ironically, the Anglophiles succeed in reinforcing the position they so stridently argue against.

But perhaps that is what they want. In this extremely classist society, scoffing at people who drop "h" or who hypercorrect remains one of the most potent tools among those for whom class distinctions, marked by language, are critical.

Dr R Anthony Lewis
Lecturer, Communication
and French
University of Technology, Jamaica
roanthony@yahoo.com

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