Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development
Editor and Book Reviews Editor: John Edwards (St Francis Xavier University, Canada)
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Volume: 19 Number: 2 Page: 108–127
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The Politics of Creole Language Education in Jamaica: 1891-1921 and the 1990s
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Lena Mccourtie
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The underachievement of ethnic minorities has been the subject of much reflection and action by educators and researchers world-wide. This two-part study uses archival and empirical research to focus on
the acquisition of English by another group, speakers of Jamaican Creole: a unique typology which can neither be categorised as foreign-language nor mother-tongue teaching. Both English and Creole share
a common lexis, but Creole speakers need expert help in acquiring the phonology, morphology and syntax of English. In Part I, archival/historical data drawn primarily from the Annual Reports of 'Her Majesty's
Inspectors' for a part of the colonial period, 1891-1921, highlight the systemic failure of pupils to acquire English in elementary schools. But in Part II, an investigation which the author conducted in
the 1990s in 'secondary' schools in postcolonial independent Jamaica finds a similar cycle of underachievement among Creole speakers. The inference to be drawn is that successive generations of these language
learners have left schools, in the words of Skutnabb-Kangas and Cummins (1988: 1), as an 'undereducated underclass'. The paper analyses the issues which have bedevilled the education of Creole speakers
in both centuries. Then, it outlines new political initiatives designed to effect change and redress the inequities of the past before the twenty-first century begins.
© Multilingual Matters 1998
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