A US$13,463 grant from American Friends of Jamaica (AFJ) will enable The University of the West Indies (The 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, said 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.

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

She explained 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.

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.