Teaching English as a second language Pt III
November 02, 2003
by Dr Winford James
We have created social language in the Caribbean since the days of slavery and the language is in our faces every blessed day of our lives, but we rubbish it on the terribly misguided altar of English as The Language - the language with (prescribed) rules and regulations. Not a day passes without our conducting many of our routine communication exchanges in Creole, but we think we are massacring the rules of English and producing a morally and linguistically bad version of it. As West Indian peoples, we must be hopelessly stupid, lazy, and careless!
After two centuries in the presence of English, the Jamaican produces 'De phone a ring'. She must be stupid, lazy, and careless. After a century of experience of English, the Trinidadian produces 'De phone ringin'. He must be stupid, lazy, and careless. Five-year-old Jamaican and Trinidadian children who enter the primary classroom speaking Creole and not English must be stupid, lazy, or careless. It is those Caribbean children who come speaking English that are intelligent, disciplined, and careful!
In two hundred years we have tried to acquire the rules of English and only managed to come up with a careless, broken version of it? What awful nonsense!
But it is a nonsense that springs effortlessly from some of our leading lights, including teachers, though not in such language because ingrained bias disallows them from thinking through their view of Creole as broken, lawless speech. It is a nonsense that prevents them from seeing that the Creole-speaking child comes to the classroom with genuine, rule-governed language in which she is constructing meaning in the universe of experience, as all children have done since we invented society. It is a nonsense that prevents them from seeing that they have to take the Creole into account in the teaching of English and, in particular, develop a knowledge of its structures and rules since the latter will be sure to intervene in the learning of English and its own set of structures and rules.
Errors will occur in a Creole-speaking child's attempt to learn English. Some of them will be reflections of Creole structures and rules, while others will be new language temporarily created as the child seeks to make the transition from saying things in Creole to saying them in English. There will be system in the errors she makes and it will be system shared by her Creole-speaking peers. The teacher must see the errors, not as careless habits or productions to be mercilessly stamped out, but as indices of learning strategies the brain is predisposed to make - as windows on the mind. Indeed, the errors are not an indication of mental stupidity or laziness but of creativity.
The child in the classroom first interprets English as Creole, then as a different language with regularities, then as a different language with both regularities and exceptions. But since all languages are complex and full of exceptions, the learning is developmental, proceeding in steps, stages, and hypotheses. In respect of the last-named, depending on the degree of exposure to the language being learnt and on the extent of exceptions and other complexities in it, they are often good, but sometimes mistaken. When they are mistaken, they will, with more exposure, more maturity, strong motivation, and good, contrastive teaching, be replaced with the right ones.
The child who produces 'De phone ringin' for 'The phone is ringing' in a classroom is seeing English as Creole, but there can be no doubt that she can soon learn to produce the English structure alongside the Creole one. Practically all of us who started out only speaking Creole have done so. In fact, we sometimes produce both structures in the same stream of speech. We have an enriched language resource, and we would be impoverished if we were to kill the Creole to keep the English. Interestingly, the most ruthless English teaching has failed over the years to suppress the Creole!
The child who, in learning subject-verb agreement in English, produces 'The CD sell for $100' versus 'The CDs sells for $100' has probably formed the mistaken hypothesis that the suffix '-s' is a plural agreement form - possibly by analogy with the noun paradigm - and so, since 'CDs' is a plural noun, she figures that its verb must end with '-s' and, since 'CD' is a singular noun, that it must not end with an '-s'.
The child knows that her Creole does not have subject-verb agreement, but notices that English does. In learning the English rules, she wrongly hypothesizes a regular rule: she puts an '-s' in a structure where it does not belong and leaves it out from a structure where it does. With the right exposure and opportunity for use, she will learn that the '-s' attaches to structures where the subject is notionally and grammatically third person singular, and is left out otherwise. Clearly, she will have to intuit, or else be taught to consciously understand, the notions of 'subject', 'person', 'third person singular', 'grammatically singular', 'notionally plural', etc.
Clearly also, the teacher will have to understand that one reason why the child is making initial errors in acquiring English subject-verb agreement structure is that her Creole lacks that structure. The teacher has to make the child notice that there is no agreement in 'The phone a ring', 'The phone dem a ring', 'The phone ringin', and 'The phone dem ringing'.
But to do so, the teacher has to scientifically appreciate that Creole is genuine language that is not broken English, but, rather, a language with its own different structures and rules.
Pt I | Pt II | Pt III
Archives / Winford James Homepage / Previous Page
^^ Back to top
|