In recent months, the Ministry of Education, Youth and Culture has been engaged in the development of a new language- education policy. This document is expected to influence the way our teaching and testing institutions approach the task of ensuring that adequate communication skills are developed in learners at every level, and that this is done in an appropriate manner.

As our teachers of English know, there are clear differences between the home language of most Jamaicans and the internationally understood version of Standard English used formally in official communication, and informally in some conversation and much written material, and particularly expected in schools. The society has thus been linguistically categorised as bilingual, despite the efforts of some no doubt well-meaning people to treat Jamaican speech as a non-language.

Still, there has been an apparent ambivalence in our attitudes to the Jamaican and English languages that we use. On the one hand, we proudly hail the achievements of Louise Bennett (at least, some have learnt to do so since Mervyn Morris argued the case for taking her work seriously, back in the 1960s); many relish the lyrics of our popular songs; and increasingly, we hear matters academic, political and commercial, discussed in the home language, on the radio and elsewhere. On the other, we often give greater respect to the speaker of English - and his views; we tend to ridicule the person who tries unsuccessfully to speak or write idiomatic English; and, there are still many who regard the Jamaican language as 'talking bad'.

The mark of the oppressor

For many, the issue has seemed to be 'one language or the other'. In the 1970s, the use of English was sometimes portrayed as the mark of the oppressor. For the late Morris Cargill (and now Chester Burgess), the Jamaican language was like the sounds made by Jonathan Swift's subhuman Yahoos. Traditionally, the school system has given recognition only to the official language, English, and there have even been schools which have fined pupils for using anything else on the school premises!

For many teachers of English, however, the reality of having two languages, and switching from one to the other as the occasion demands, has been recognised as an admirable thing. Their preoccupation, therefore, has been to guide their pupils into using each language appropriately, and into using it accurately.

Some will have seen, in The Gleaner of September 15, 2001, a report of Education Minister Senator Burchell Whiteman, defending his position "that Patois can legitimately be used in the education system" in responding to "critics of his support for the Jamaican dialect as a teaching tool". The report continues: "The dialect can be used to help students better understand formal English, the minister has said."

What the new policy document coming from Mr Whiteman's ministry will be doing, therefore, is giving support and encouragement to those teachers who have been heeding the advice of the linguistics researchers, and making both languages live in the classroom, while understandably placing a heavy emphasis on the acquisition of grammatical and idiomatic English.

Excerpts from the draft policy document are given below.

The five likely options for Jamaica [are] described below.

1. Declare the Jamaican language situation bilingual, ascribing equal language status to SJE and JC. Tailor instruction to accommodate this status, and permit instruction and assessment in both languages. Produce printed materials in both languages, and permit teaching in both languages, using appropriate instructional strategies.

2. While retaining SJE as the official language, promote the acquisition of basic literacy in the early years in the home language and facilitate the development of English as a second language.

3. Maintain SJE as the official language and promote basic communication through the oral use of the home language in the early years while facilitating the development of literacy in English.

4. Continue in a bidialectal mode, but pay closer attention to the methods of instruction that will facilitate competence in the official language.

5. Engage in immersion in English through exposure to literature and interactive/communicative strategies, while being tolerant of the use of Creole by students who experience difficulty communicating in the official language.

The Ministry of Education, Youth and Culture recognises:

While option two is desirable, to facilitate language learning in Jamaica, like option one, it is not immediately feasible as there is no agreed orthography for Jamaican Creole. Besides, issues such as funding for an adequate supply of literacy materials, as well as political and social attitudes to Creole as a medium of instruction (Bryan 2000), particularly the latter, could present obstacles that are difficult to overcome.

The Ministry of Education and Culture, therefore, supports the third option.