Several articles on the Caribbean language situation and its implications for Caribbean education in general, and the teaching of English in particular, have appeared in the Caribbean Journal of Education during the 35 years of its existence. They reflect recognition of Creoles as real languages and also increasing appreciation of them as symbols of culture and national identity. One manifestation of this is a relatively positive attitude to the use of these vernaculars in the classroom, in one way or another, alongside the co-existent European language.

This paper reports on the development of an observation instrument that is designed to assess teachers of language and literacy in the Caribbean, and to provide an avenue for feedback to these teachers. The instrument contains four broad dimensions (planning, execution, classroom environment, and reflection), each with several items that are based on literature in the field, and validated by literacy professionals in the Caribbean. The items on the instrument were piloted across the region and modified before the final version was produced.

In this paper the 'subjective consciousness' of 'Bettina' (who begins from a place of self-conscious obedience to the edict that teachers should always 'speak proper English' and battles cognitive dissonance as she attempts to use the students' home language, Jamaican Creole as the medium of instruction) is interwoven with the subjective consciousness of students participating in her JC/SJE bilingual project. This dialogue of perspectives exposes some of the complexities of the classroom as sociolinguistic and emotional psychological space.

The current study explores the racial and linguistic self-concept of 138 children between the ages of 5 and 10 years, enrolled in a poor, urban, Jamaican government school. In Jamaica, studies into the racial self-concept of adults have been conducted since as early as 1952 (Kerr); however no study into the development of racial and linguistic self-concept in Jamaican children has yet been documented.

This paper takes up the Jamaican Creole/Standard English (JC/SE) debates and argues that they often reproduce false binaries between Creole and English and the oral and written. I map out some of their terrain by sampling editorials and letters from local newspapers, the Gleaner and the Observer, and offer up a brief history of the various positions of linguists and educators on the SE/JC question.

This paper provides a comparative analysis of the writing performance in English of African heritage students in Birmingham, England and Kingston, Jamaica. The study explores the effects of language use on the written production of English among African heritage students in two geographical locations, Birmingham, England and Kingston, Jamaica. Particular attention is drawn to the effects of Jamaican Creole usage in Jamaica and Creole/Black British Talk in England, on the achievement levels of African heritage students.

To understand the significance of the online launch of this issue of the Journal of Education and Development in the Caribbean (JEDIC), one must understand its beginnings. Created by the late Professor Dennis Craig and Professor Emerita Zellynne Jennings-Craig, JEDIC was birthed out of a need to produce scholarly research by and for the Caribbean people, pertaining to both education and development. The first issue, published in June 1997 in Guyana, produced four articles, one book review and one thesis abstract.

A recent report of a workshop on educational curriculum and remediation held by the Eastern Caribbean Education Reform Project (ECERP), provides an interesting backdrop to language education in the Caribbean and incidentally supports the rationale for this book.

The 23 pages of "Notes" at the end of this book contain a set of cogent comments on some of the most fundamental and controversial issues affecting English teaching today. One is tempted to suggest that the teacher-in-training, for example, should begin a study of this book with a series of group discussions on the topics treated in these Notes. Surely the modern English teacher must have carefully considered the following: the importance of "context situation"; the emphasis on the tripartite interaction of language, other experience and thought; and the analysis of spontaneous talk.

The simple title of the book, What do Jamaican children speak? A language resource, belies the complexity of what the author, Michele Kennedy, successfully does in describing the language that many Jamaican children bring to the classroom given our variable language situation. This variability exists because two codes, Jamaican English (JE) and the English-lexified Jamaican Creole (JC) coexist, and the distinctions between them are often blurred in the minds of its speakers.