Peter Maxwell, Contributor

I have real sympathy with those who are surprised that anybody in a school would want to make use of the Jamaican language (which the academics call Creole and the rest of us call Patois). After all, most of us have been socialised into believing that it isn't a language at all, that it is at best a dialect of English - suitable for entertainment, perhaps, and for chatting with your family and friends - but that it should have nothing to do with education.

What is true, though, is that a number of wise people have been trying to show us another side of the story for two or three generations already. People like Beryl Loftman-Bailey, D. R. B. Grant and Dennis Craig taught a lot of others that the Jamaican language is not just a dialect, since it has its own system of rules, both for grammar and for pronunciation, and that while most of its words are derived from English words, it is as different from English as Portuguese is from Spanish, or as Haitian is from French.

Target language

Others, like Mervyn Alleyne, Hubert Devonish and Pauline Christie have, for decades, explained that it is known all over the world that if your home language (Jamaican, for instance) is recognised and respected, you will learn a target language (English, for instance) more easily. This is why organisations such as the National Association of Teachers of English (NATE) have encouraged teachers to help children to learn English by noting the similarities and differences between the languages.

Clearly, it is to our advantage to have all Jamaicans proficient in the use of English. Unfortunately, too many adults who claim to be speakers and writers of English set a very poor example for others, never having understood those differences, and getting confused about singular and plural form, about the agreement of subject and verb, or of pronoun and antecedent, and about the accepted form of idiomatic expressions.

At the beginning of this 21st century, the Ministry of Education set up a committee to develop a language-education policy for Jamaica. A careful document was drawn up, with the assistance of able and concerned educators and other stakeholders, and circulated for comment in 2001, prior, we were told, to being submitted for executive approval at Cabinet level.

Official language

According to this document, the proposed policy retains Standard Jamaican English (SJE) as the official language and advocates the policy option of transitional bilingualism, promoting oral use of the home language in schools until skills in SJE are developed. Within this option, emphasis is placed on the employment of bilingual and bidialectal teaching strategies, particularly at the early primary level and again at the early secondary level, where numerous language and literacy needs are also manifested.

It is a pity that the scholarship and good intentions of that transformational exercise appear to have come to nought. Nothing further was heard of it.

Peter Maxwell is an educator and editor of the publications of Jamaica's National Association of Teachers of English.