Beyond grammar - teaching English in an Anglophone Creole environment

Velma Pollard

Fri. 9-10:40 C

Disillusionment with only moderate success with the use of current methods of teaching English in a creole-speaking environment, has led some Caribbean educators to suggest that this is the time to revert to earlier classroom methods, specifically to the teaching of grammar, if student performance in English is to improve. While it is my view that the claims made for the teaching of grammar are not always well founded and that the perception which extols it suffers from blindness to other relevant factors predominantly the sociolinguistic ones evident in any comparison between early and contemporary school populations, I consider it a useful exercise to attempt some kind of response to the cry for grammar in the English classroom.

The present paper looks at actual errors made by students attending a variety of secondary institutions in the Caribbean and attempts to categorize these errors. The categories are then examined to see which ones might actually benefit from the active inclusion of processes commonly undertaken under the rubric Grammar" in current curricula. A discussion related to considerations of phonology, lexicon and idiom is introduced.