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Nero.pdf

World Englishes, Vol. 25, No. 3/4, pp. 501–511, 2006. 0883–2919

Language, identity, and education of Caribbean English speakers

SHONDEL NERO∗

ABSTRACT: The large-scale ongoing migration of Anglophone Caribbean natives to North America, particularly to New York City, in the last two decades, has brought an influx of Caribbean English (CE)- speaking students into US and Canadian schools and colleges. This article discusses the extent to which such students, who publicly identify themselves as native speakers of English but whose variety of English is often misunderstood by North American teachers, challenge the latter to examine their tacit assump- tions about the English language, ownership of English, and linguistic identity. The author provides examples of commonly used features of CE that are likely to create misunderstanding in American classrooms. She argues that teachers of Caribbean English speakers will need to explore new paradigms for language placement, assessment and development, and finally proposes an agenda for responding to the linguistic and broader educational needs of CE-speaking students.

INTRODUCTION1

The following is an excerpt from a dialogue in the late Caribbean writer Samuel Selvon’s (1956) novel, The Lonely Londoners. In this scene, Galahad, a Trinidadian immigrant in England, is conversing with a White Englishwoman, Daisy, after their first date:

“You get that raise the foreman was promising you?” Galahad ask, for something to say.

“What did you say? You know it will take me some time to understand everything you say.

The way you West Indians speak!”

“What wrong with it?” Galahad ask. “Is English we speaking.” (cited in Morris, 1993: 18)

The exchange between Galahad and Daisy illustrates a curious clash of assumptions – curious because Galahad assumes that he and Daisy speak a common language, that is, English. But Daisy’s response to Galahad, suggesting that she could not understand him, framed his language as “other,” “non-English” – in short, as nonnative, prompting Galahad’s defensive retort, “Is English we speaking” – a retort that claims ownership of English, but that, ironically, alienates him further from Daisy because of its nonstandard phrasing. Just as Daisy asserts that she could not understand Galahad’s way of speaking, so are many teachers challenged to understand the speech and/or writing of a rapidly growing number of Anglophone Caribbean2 (also known as West Indian) immigrant students in North American schools and colleges.

This article examines the extent to which linguistic misunderstandings between speakers of different varieties of English (such as Daisy and Galahad) call into question assump- tions about, and attitudes toward, non-American and non-British varieties of English, the nature of English itself, linguistic identity, language, culture and ethnicity, and the

∗ St John’s University School of Education, Sullivan Hall Room 415, St John’s University, 8000 Utopia Parkway, Queens, NY 11439, USA. E-mail: neros@stjohns.edu

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implications for language teaching. Caribbean English (CE) will be used as the main reference point, although it should be noted that the linguistic and educational issues of CE speakers in many ways parallel those of speakers of South Asian and African varieties of English. In this paper, I propose a responsive educational agenda for CE speakers, one that, among other things, validates different varieties of English in the classroom.

DEFINITION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF CARIBBEAN ENGLISH

Before examining the situation of CE speakers in school, a brief discussion of the complex definition of CE itself, and then its status within the world Englishes paradigm, is necessary. Caribbean English is a contact language emanating mainly from the encoun- ter of British colonial masters with the enslaved and later indentured labor force brought to the Caribbean to work on the sugar plantations. Because slavery largely eradicated the ethnic languages of the exploited groups, the Creoles and Creole English that evolved in the Caribbean became the vernacular, but more importantly, became publicly labeled as English, because of the stigmatization of Creoles.

In The Oxford Companion to the English Language, Lawrence Carrington (1992) pro- vides a definition of Caribbean English as “[a] general term for the English language used in the Caribbean archipelago and circum-Caribbean mainland. In a narrow sense, it covers English alone; in a broad sense it covers English and Creole” (pp. 191–3). Carrington notes that the term is somewhat imprecise because of: (1) a long-standing popular classification of varieties of Creole as dialects of English, sometimes called Creole dialects or patois; (2) the existence of a continuum of usage between English and Creole (known as a creole continuum); (3) the use by scholars of the term English to cover both, as in the Dictionary of Jamaican English. By way of clarification, Carrington offers a list of meanings embraced in the term CE: (1) regionally accented varieties of the standard language (the acrolect); (2) localized forms of English; (3) mesolects between English and Creole, as found in most communities; (4) kinds of English used in countries where Spanish is dominant (e.g., English in Panama); (5) varieties of English-based Creole (the basilect) (cited in Morris, 1993: 19).

Today, among Caribbean and other linguists, there is still debate about whether to consider English-based Creoles dialects of English or separate languages. As Peter Roberts (1988) notes, “The wide spectrum in Jamaica challenges the definition of a language in that it calls into question the extent to which two speech varieties in a society can differ and still be treated as belonging to the same language” (p. 9). The debate is more political than linguistic, as has always been the case when discussions of language vs. dialect come up. Mufwene (2001, 2004) offers an insightful discussion on what he characterizes as “an insidious naming tradition,” noting that much of the debate about whether Creoles and other new Englishes are labeled as separate languages or dialects of English has to do with who is setting the norms (in this case, “non-native speakers”) rather than anything inherent to the varieties themselves.

The average Caribbean person is not even aware that these academic debates on lan- guage vs. dialect exist; they only encounter them when they are forced to consider movements such as those in Jamaica to make Creole an official language, or when they come to school in North America and are placed in an ESL class because their English

Language, identity, and education of CE speakers 503

“sounds” or “looks” nonnative; hence, the assumption that their home language is other than English. This point will be taken up later.

Within the world Englishes paradigm, CE has been seen as somewhat unique. Braj Kachru, for example, has noted the challenge of placing CE, partly because this variety has evolved in ways quite unlike any of those in the three traditional concentric circles of English. As Kachru (1992) notes, “[c]ountries such as South Africa or Jamaica are difficult to place within the concentric circles. In terms of the English-using populations and the functions of English, their situations are rather complex” (p. 362). The Caribbean closely approximates the Outer Circle because of its history of British colonization, except that in the Outer Circle countries, which are mostly in Asia and Africa, there is a more clear-cut bilingual or multilingual population. In the Anglophone Caribbean, because Creole has not been publicly recognized or accepted as a language in its own right, there is no widespread popular perception of bilingualism per se (even though linguists and folklorists assert the autonomous status of the Creole language). Thus, the linguistic situation in the region may be characterized as bidialectal, where the majority of the population move back and forth along the creole continuum engaging in what LePage and Tabouret-Keller (1985) call “acts of identity,” that is to say, revealing through their use of language both their personal identity and sense of social and ethnic solidarity and difference.

Historically, CE has been extensively treated in the literature on Pidgins and Creoles. However, in the last two decades, there has been a growing recognition of CE as part of the world Englishes family, evidenced by published articles on CE in World Englishes (Clachar, 2003; Pratt-Johnson, 1993; Winford, 1997; Youssef, 2001). In this regard, we can look forward to seeing a continuation of the trend toward more collaborative and inclusive scholarship between Creole and world English scholars.

MIGRATION OF CARIBBEAN ENGLISH SPEAKERS

Today, because of migration and globalization, CE speakers are spread around the world, especially in large metropolitan areas such as New York City, Toronto, and London, and with their migration, they have brought their variety of English. The to- tal population in the English-speaking Caribbean is approximately 5,000,000. Of this, the largest influx of Anglophone Caribbean immigrants to the United States hails from Jamaica (689,000 at the 2000 census count),3 and roughly 300,000 from Guyana, where the author is from. In New York City alone, there are approximately 200,000 Guyanese. This is a significant number given that the population of Guyana is less than one million. For some Inner Circle schools and colleges, this influx of Anglophone Caribbean immi- grants means that educators will encounter speakers and writers of English who see themselves as very much part of the family of world Englishes, and feel a legitimate claim to, and identification with, English, however different their variety of English is from the standardized variety privileged in school.

Also within Caribbean communities, the question of linguistic identity is somewhat complex. While speech at the basilectal level is typically denigrated because of its asso- ciation with low socio-economic status and lack of education, the basilect and especially the mesolect are often used to assert “true” Caribbean identity in informal and private domains. This trend has been particularly visible since many Caribbean nations gained independence during the 1960s. Thus, there is a contradictory impulse of simultaneously denigrating and celebrating the vernacular, aptly characterized by Kachru and Nelson

504 Shondel Nero

(2001) in comparing similar contradictory impulses elsewhere in the English-speaking world as “attitudinal schizophrenia” (p. 15). At school, and in other formal and public domains both in the Caribbean and elsewhere, most CE speakers identify with English, and more importantly, think of themselves as native speakers of English. In the Caribbean, educators understand CE speakers since they too are mostly from the local community. In many cases, the first challenge to CE speakers’ identification with, and use of, English is when they enter school or college in North America or England where standardized American and British varieties of English are privileged.

CARIBBEAN ENGLISH: CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS

The encounter with CE speakers challenges three fundamental assumptions of many teachers in North America and in the United Kingdom: (1) the assumption of the so-called “native speaker” as inherently tied to race/ethnicity; (2) the assumption that English is monolithic; (3) the assumption that only standardized English counts as English. First, the notion of the native speaker has already been extensively challenged in the literature (refer to work by Canagarajah, 1999; Davies, 1991; Ferguson, 1992; Kachru, 1986; Paikeday, 1985; Widdowson, 1994, and a host of others), yet many educators continue to hold on to a racist notion that only speakers of European heritage (American or British) can be considered native speakers of English. Hence, teachers are surprised when Caribbean or other world English speakers such as Indians, Nigerians or Filipinos identify English as their language, too – English, that is, as they have known, shaped, and used it. As Widdowson (1994) eloquently put it, “The very fact that English is an international language means that no nation can have custody over it . . . It is not a possession which they [so-called native speakers] lease out to others, while still retaining the freehold. Other people actually own it” (p. 385).

There seems to be a certain hierarchy of acceptance of English, which is tied to race and ethnicity. In the opening dialog of this paper, Daisy claimed it would take her some time to “understand” Galahad because of the way he spoke English. I suspect, though, that a cockney speaker would be no more “understandable” to Daisy than Galahad, yet the former would not be considered a nonnative speaker of English. Mufwene (2001) captures this phenomenon best when he asserts, “the naming practice of new Englishes has to do more with the racial identity of those who speak them than with how these varieties developed and the extent of their structural deviations. It has little to do with how mutually intelligible they are” (p. 107). This social construction of race as inherently implicated in linguistic identity and in claims of language authority has direct implications for how teachers view and assess Caribbean students’ language and, by extension, how the students view and assess themselves.

The second assumption that is challenged by the presence of CE speakers is that English is monolithic. While language diversity and change are inevitable, the notion that English should “look like” or “sound like” one thing – the variety of English spoken by those in power – is still pervasive. The particular syntax, pronunciation, lexical items and mean- ings, and discourse norms of CE, even its standardized forms, challenge the monolithic perception of English held by many North American teachers. In New York City all public school children are required to complete a Home Language Information Survey (HLIS) form. In my research, I have found that, generally, Anglophone Caribbean students will list English only as their home language on the form, as opposed to, say,

Language, identity, and education of CE speakers 505

an Indian student who might list Gujarati and English, or even Gujarati alone. Caribbean students’ self-ascribed public linguistic identity with English only often reinforces a dual impulse in the minds of their American teachers. On the one hand, teachers might project a high level of receptive and especially productive competence in standardized English on them, and then penalize them if their work does not evidence such competence, especially in writing. On the other hand, teachers might assume that their Caribbean students’ accented English is not “real” English because it “sounds” different than the teachers’ or, worse, because the CE speaker is likely non-European and an immigrant, and so they approach and evaluate the students’ English as not merely different but deficient.

The third assumption challenged is that only standardized English counts as English. Here, schools have been the chief culprits in perpetuating the notion that only proficiency in the standardized prescriptivist grammar of English privileged in school, especially evidenced in essayist literacy, counts as “real” English. Grammar functions, as Widdowson (1994) observes, as the shibboleth in school. While teachers might be tolerant of diversity in pronunciation or lexicon, they are less so of grammar, which reflects the attitude in the society at large. To the extent that a Caribbean student does not display proficiency in standardized grammar or displays a different grammar, particularly in writing, she or he will be considered as not knowing how to write, or worse, not knowing English at all. This is true, of course, for many speakers of English who are not proficient in a standardized Inner Circle variety.

UNDERSTANDING CARIBBEAN ENGLISH

I will highlight here some of the salient features of CE that teachers might encounter, and more importantly, discuss those areas that are likely to result in true misunderstand- ing, and suggest an agenda that might help move us forward in terms of placement, assessment, and language development in the classroom for CE speakers. To do so, I will begin by citing an excerpt from my book (Nero, 2001), which documents a qualitative study of four CE-speaking college students in New York City over a two-year period. The excerpt is taken from the story of Charles, one of the four participants in the study:

In an autobiographical essay completed in his basic writing class, Charles Benjamin, a native of

Guyana, described his romantic relationship with a young woman, which eventually led to the

young woman’s pregnancy as follows: “So I started talking to a young lady and she got

pregnant.” Charles’ writing instructor responded to this statement with the comment, “big

jump,” suggesting there was a logical gap between Charles’ merely talking to the young woman

and her becoming pregnant. The implication here is that a process of acquaintance is normally

expected to take place over time before two people bear a child; hence the instructor expected

Charles to elaborate on that presumed acquaintance in transitional sentences. The instructor was

obviously unaware that Charles’ use of the word talking in this context carried the Guyanese Creole English meaning of ‘getting to know, dating, and possibly becoming sexually involved

with.’ With this semantic load in mind, Charles felt that his choice of the word talking was per- fectly logical, and so he found the instructor’s comment puzzling. The instructor, on the other

hand, read the word talking with the standardized English prototypical meaning, that is, to “engage in conversation,” and so, quite innocently, missed Charles’ intended meaning. Ironically,

the very clarification implicitly requested by the instructor’s comment had already been

(mis)communicated. (p. 1)

506 Shondel Nero

That Charles’ instructor misinterpreted his use of the word talking can be largely attributed to the fact that she was unfamiliar with his variety of English. This exemplifies Smith’s (1992) contention that “the greater the familiarity a speaker (native or non-native) has with a variety of English, the more likely it is that s/he will understand, and be understood by, members of that speech community” (p. 76). Smith was making the case that there are three degrees of understanding on a continuum starting from intelligibility, the lowest level (word/utterance recognition); then comprehensibility (word/utterance meaning or locutionary force); then interpretability, the highest level (meaning behind the word/utterance or illocutionary force) (p. 76). It is clearly at the interpretability level that communication between Charles and his instructor broke down, which can only be remedied by both Charles’ and the instructor’s becoming more familiar with each other’s variety of English.

The confusion resulting from lexical items which appear to be regular standard English words (such as talking in the example above) but carry Caribbean meaning is one of the most common areas of miscommunication between North American educators and Caribbean students. Winer (1993), who has researched Trinidadian Creole English exten- sively, refers to such cases as “false friends.” A few more examples of false friends are illustrated in Table 1 (SAE = Standard American English).

Palmer’s (1996) work on cultural linguistics has helped to shed light on this phenom- enon of presumed understanding based on surface level linguistic familiarity. By taking as a premise the notion that human language instantiates cultural conceptualizations, Palmer argues that speakers from different backgrounds draw on different conceptualizations when communicating with each other. The assumption, then, that interlocutors speaking/ writing the same language (in this case, English) are drawing on the same conceptual systems is misguided, and can lead to the kinds of misunderstanding that occurred between Charles and his instructor.

Another area that is often cited as a cause for misunderstanding is accent. Accent differences, per se, do not generally cause misunderstanding, unless they are at the very extreme ends of the spectrum. In the case of CE, it is the syllable-timed nature of pronunciation (often referred to as the sing-song or lilting accent) as opposed to the stress-timed nature of American English that can be unfamiliar to the non-Caribbean ear. For example, the word condemn in standardized American English is normally pronounced with primary stress on the second syllable. In CE, by contrast, both the

Table 1.Selected lexical items with corresponding CE and SAE meanings

Lexical item Meaning in CE Meaning in SAE

Hand Part of the body from the Part of the body from the wrist to the fingers

shoulders to the fingers

Foot Part of the body from the Part of the body from the ankles to the toes

Foot thighs to the toes

Tea Any hot beverage Specific beverage made from tea leaves

Pear Avocado A variety of fruit round at the base and

narrow toward the stem

Goblet Covered pitcher made of clay A drinking glass with a stem and base

in which water is kept cool

Language, identity, and education of CE speakers 507

first and second syllable would be given equal stress. This difference might simply require more open-minded listening. Another example of marked pronunciation difference is the dropping of word-initial “h” by some Jamaicans (as in “appy” for (happy) or “elp” for (help), or adding an “h” elsewhere (as in “hegg” or “hoffice”). Normally, the intended meaning can be inferred from the context. Pratt-Johnson (1993) cites a case in which a Jamaican student in a math class in New York City pronounced the number 338 as “tree- tree-hate,” after which she was teased by many of her classmates. Clearly, in the context of a math class everyone knew what she meant.

In the classroom, because of the disproportionate focus on writing, CE-influenced writing is heavily marked in the eyes of the teacher. Most of the time, this influence is evidenced by zero inflection for tense, subject–verb concord, plurals, possessives, as well as absence or minimum use of the passive voice, all of which rarely result in misunderstand- ing. The negative judgment of these features is simply due to the fact that they do not conform to prescriptive grammar conventions. These features are present in the writing of most nonstandard dialect and basic writers, including those in the Inner Circle.

There are, however, two commonly used grammatical features that carry different meanings in CE than in SAE. The first is the word does, which in CE, especially in Guyana, is generally unstressed and used to signal habitual action or fact (Roberts, 1988), e.g., My friend does go to Syracuse University (which means ‘My friend goes to Syracuse University’). In SAE, on the other hand, does is generally stressed to emphasize contrast, e.g., does go as opposed to does not go. In one instance in my research on Caribbean students’ writing, I found that the teacher simply crossed out the Caribbean student’s use of the word does before the main verb, and replaced it with the simple present tense form of the main verb. When I probed the teacher’s correction, she explained that the student’s use of does struck her as an unnecessary emphasis (reading from a SAE perspective) since there was no contrasting position established in the text; hence, she removed what she perceived as a superfluous use of does. Although the teacher in this case arrived at the student’s intended meaning, it should be noted that her motivation for removing does countered the student’s reason for using it.

Another grammatical feature is the CE speaker’s use of the modal would, where in many cases Americans would say will. Would has a much wider patterned use in CE, and has, in fact, standardized. In Allsopp’s (1996) Dictionary of Caribbean English, he notes that would has standardized in CE to signal a range of conditional instances. For example, I received an e-mail from an American-born linguist who has lived and studied extensively in the Caribbean, which read as follows: “I hope you would come to see me this summer.” My husband, who is American, thought the use of would in this sentence was odd. He assured me that most Americans would use will in this context. Being from the Caribbean myself, the sentence was quite unmarked to my eyes and ear. Interestingly, in a recent issue of World Englishes, Bautista (2004) reports on a study showing that would also has wider usage in Philippine English. This reflects the dynamism of language, that is to say, words can take on multiple grammatical (and semantic) functions in different contexts.

ADDRESSING THE NEEDS OF CE SPEAKERS IN SCHOOL

Several questions arise in the placement of CE speakers in US classrooms. First, there are the practical matters that teachers must attend to: Where should these students be placed? In an ESL class? A mainstream class? Or an English as a Second Dialect (ESD)

508 Shondel Nero

class (if one exists at the school)? How should teachers respond to or evaluate writing and speech that seems “marked” by CE-influenced features (which most teachers are perhaps unable to identify)? What teaching strategies should be used to foster the Caribbean students’ language development? How should/can educators find the right balance between validating Caribbean students’ vernacular and teaching them standardized American English? What are the most appropriate materials to use with such students?

These questions, however, cannot be addressed apart from the larger issues that con- front both educators and students in the classroom. For instance, how do we confront the ambivalent (and often negative) language attitudes vis-à-vis the vernacular internalized by teachers and students alike? How do we confront the culture of power in the classroom that privileges only one variety of English and perpetuates a unidirectional, static view of language acquisition? How do we best prepare teachers to deal with CE and other forms of linguistic diversity in the classroom, particularly teachers who have not had linguistic training such as in TESOL programs? How do we access and appropriately utilize resources for dealing with language diversity? Finally, how do we create a school culture that helps Caribbean students transition effectively to American classrooms?

I do not claim to have definitive answers to all the questions I raise here, but I would like to propose an agenda for a more linguistically and culturally responsive education for the CE-speaking and similar populations. First, in terms of placement, I have argued elsewhere (Nero, 2000) that the traditional ESL classroom is not an appropriate place for helping CE speakers acquire standardized American English, because of the fact that their receptive knowledge and to a large extent their productive, oral skills in English far exceed those of the traditional ESL student (e.g. a Spanish or Chinese speaker); also their self- identification as native speakers of English makes them less motivated to learn English defined as a “second” language. Peirce (1995) argues forcefully that a person’s investment in learning a language is an investment in his or her own evolving social identity, and to the extent that Anglophone Caribbean students already identify with a variety of English, they are less likely to make a deliberate investment in learning it as a separate language.

Rampton (1985) critically examined similar placement issues vis-à-vis British Asian speakers of English, arguing that “the putative home/school language divide” (p. 188) – English being spoken at school, and the mother tongue being used exclusively at home – is misguided. He asserts that “in reality Asian children might be speaking English at home a great deal” (p. 188), and in fact, “the majority of British Asian youngsters cannot now be classified as ESL learners” (p. 195).

Nonetheless, with regard to CE, it should be noted that there are some Caribbean linguists who strongly believe that CE speakers are, in fact, speaking another language, and therefore should be placed in an ESL class (Devonish, 1986; Folkes, 2004). I believe, however, that CE speakers should be placed in mainstream classes with teachers who have been trained in linguistic diversity, including world Englishes, through ongoing staff development. Such training is particularly needed in metropolitan areas with large popu- lations of Caribbean immigrants like New York City, Miami, Atlanta, Toronto, and London. Training should include becoming familiar with (1) Caribbean culture, beyond what Winer calls the “sun and fun” exotic view of the Caribbean; (2) prototypical fea- tures of CE; and (3) speech community discourse norms, including nonverbal communi- cation (e.g., direct eye contact with the teacher or an adult is considered rude in Caribbean schools, which is very different from American schools). The hiring of Caribbean teachers, as has been done in some New York City public schools, is also helpful in this regard.

Language, identity, and education of CE speakers 509

Caribbean teachers can serve as cultural brokers in the classroom, helping to bridge the linguistic and cultural gap between teachers and students. Their partnership with American teachers can also build cross-cultural understanding.

In terms of teaching and assessment strategies for language and literacy development, I offer the following suggestions based on my own work with New York City teachers:

• Probe students for clarification whenever pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary features impede communication (as was the case with Charles and his instructor).

• Use dialect features and discourse patterns found in students’ speech and writings to discuss their appropriateness for various genres and audiences and to compare and contrast the

rhetorical styles used in the home and school cultures. For an insightful discussion of sensi-

tivity to various cultural rhetorical styles within the educational arena, see Fox (1994). Hinkel’s

(1999) volume on the role of culture in second language writing also sheds light in this area.

• Use alternative forms of assessment that are inclusive of all varieties of English, including the standard variety.

• Have students read, write, and share stories in their variety of English as well as standard English. This shows varieties of Englishes in juxtaposition rather than opposition. Encourage students to research their community language through projects and interviews with family and

community members.

• Use material and literature in class by writers using different varieties of English. (e.g., Achebe, Naipaul, Grace Nichols, etc.). This also validates the multiplicity of Englishes.

• Provide reference sources in the classroom on various Englishes, e.g., The Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, The American Heritage Dictionary, Dictionary of South African English, etc.

• Provide multiple opportunities for reading and writing in the classroom. Introduce students to the writing process.

One way that the larger issues that confront educators in the classroom from a linguistic perspective can be addressed is to make language itself a focus of study – language, that is, in its broadest sense, and not just its form. It is interesting that language is the medium of study and the principal yardstick by which we measure academic achievement in school, yet language use and language prejudice are rarely problematized in the classroom, outside of sociolinguistic courses. Wolfram (1990, 1993, 2004) has long advocated dialect diversity study in schools as one way to understand, legitimize and affirm language variation. I echo Wolfram’s sentiments in that we can only begin to confront language prejudice if we are prepared to encourage honest, open dialog in the classroom about language diversity, language use, and language attitudes, especially those negative attitudes toward non- American and non-British varieties of English that have been internalized by many, includ- ing their own speakers. This, I am sure, will not be easy but it certainly underlies the hidden curriculum in schools, where negative judgments are routinely made on the speakers of these “other” varieties of English. An honest dialog about language will allow students to see that the privileging of one variety of English in school is not accidental. And while students have every right to acquire a standardized variety of English, they should also know that that variety is implicated in power relations and not inherently superior; that language prejudice merely indexes race and class-based and other prejudices in the society at large.

The agenda being proposed here undoubtedly comes with challenges. For one thing, in terms of CE speakers, there are concrete challenges to be faced such as:

• defining the population (who speaks Creole or Creole English?); • identifying their needs;

510 Shondel Nero

• placing students appropriately; • getting all teachers sufficiently trained in language diversity; • finding culturally relevant and appropriate material; • allowing ample time to implement strategies for literacy development; • CE speakers’ resentment at being placed in ESL class if that occurs; • CE speakers’ skepticism about American teachers telling them about their own dialect; • the perception that teachers are validating nonstandard varieties of English in school in a

culture that preaches “standard American English only” allowed in school.

These challenges, however, are a necessary part of the educational process. I believe that only by finding a space for various Englishes in the classroom can we lessen the likelihood of linguistic misunderstanding and simultaneously affirm our Caribbean students’ and other world English speakers’ linguistic/cultural identity, which is the basis for culturally responsive education.

NOTES

1. This report is adapted from a presentation under the same title given at the International Association for World Englishes Conference at Syracuse University on July 17, 2004.

2. By Anglophone Caribbean, I am referring to the former British colonies in the Caribbean region, as well as the mainland countries of Belize in Central America and Guyana in South America, in all of which English remains the official language.

3. All demographic statistical data are taken from the US. 2000 Census Data at http://www.census.gov.

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