A five-year programme in which students in about 10 primary schools would learn to read and write the Jamaican language or patois alongside English has been developed and is awaiting funding to be implemented.

Head of the Jamaican Language Unit at the University of the West Indies, Mona Professor Hubert Devonish says the project could help Jamaican children improve their literacy in the English language.

The proposed project seeks to build on a similar programme in which the Jamaican language was taught along with English at Hope Valley Experimental Primary and Infant School in St Andrew between 2004 and 2008.

Under that project, textbooks in science, mathematics and other subjects were translated and reproduced in the Jamaican language using the Cassidy writing system, and used to teach the children, with the blessing of the Ministry of Education.

Developed in 1961 by Jamaica-born American linguist Frederic Cassidy, the Cassidy system is a way of spelling words the way they are pronounced, rather that following the English way of spelling them.

The Hope Valley project produced some encouraging results.

“The interesting thing about the project is that the boys did pretty well. It didn’t seem to have much of an effect on the girls but the boys didn’t do that much better in English. They performed way better than the boys who were not in the project,” Devonish said last Monday.

He was speaking at the Jamaica Observer’s Monday Exchange where the launch of the New Testament of the Bible in the Jamaican language was discussed.

Devonish is an advocate for patois to be made an official language in Jamaica and be used alongside English in the education system.

The subject has stirred much controversy in Jamaica, with passionate views both for and against the use of patois.

Commenting on the Hope Valley project, Devonish said the teachers delivered lessons bilingually in both English and Jamaican creole, and told the children when they were switching languages.

“They are now well into secondary school. They haven’t grown any horns and have done pretty well,” Devonish said of the students in that programme.

Grade two teacher at Hope Valley Maureen Dunkley, who was one of the educators in the project, said teaching in patois gave more children the confidence to speak in class, and provided a gateway to the learning of English.

“The children loved it and it sounded funny and strange to them, because they wouldn’t normally hear me speak like that in class,” Dunkley told Career & Education.

“Concepts in English that they found difficult like the word ‘their’, we said ‘fe dem’ to bring it over to the students as clearly as possible. But we didn’t just leave it there, we explained that there were two languages and we can translate from one to the other,” she said.

Dunkley admitted that some teachers and parents were not comfortable with the project, but couldn’t recall any parent disallowing a child to participate.

“Some parents were puzzled until they realised what we were doing,” she said.

Devonish is of the view that the Ministry of Education has become more conservative on the question of the use of patois, but said the present minister, Ronald Thwaites, has said a bilingual programme that ran up to grade four was in keeping with ministry policy.

“The language education policy said the approach of teaching the children to read and write in both languages was ideal but not practical. We have said that it is not only ideal but it is practical,” Devonish said.