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 twenty-three 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.

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.

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.

Research in education in Jamaica has increasingly pointed to gender as a critical factor in achievement. Early research focused on the continuing disparities between options available to women as opposed to men (LeoRhynie 1987; Hamilton 1987). More recently the focus has been on the perceived underachievement of male pupils and students, manifested in the work of Miller (1991) and Chevannes (1999), where the performance of boys across the school sector has come under scrutiny.

In the past 20 years there has been a change in the approach to the teaching of writing skills. Traditionally, teachers focused on the text produced by students on their own, that is, on the final product of their writing. The teacher’s main task was to evaluate this product. Now the focus has changed to the process of writing. Known as the process approach to writing, this approach can be defined as a multiple-draft process, which consists of generating ideas, writing a first draft with emphasis on content, with subsequent drafts to revise ideas and the way those ideas are expressed.

The special problems of teaching Standard English in the officially English-speaking Caribbean are reviewed.

This paper is an investigation of the language varieties understood and used by teachers, and recognition of the implications of these understandings for language education. It acknowledges the role played by teachers and the education system in language maintenance and language change in a period of mass education, which is now moving toward universal secondary education (USE).

The idea of using literature in the English language classroom is certainly not a novel one. Indeed, as early as the nineteenth century, English literature was taught in Europe mainly for the purpose of teaching English language skills, by placing emphasis on the ways in which writers expressed their ideas and articulated their thoughts (Milner and Milner 2003). This was because the teaching of literature, which was mainly done in Greek and Latin, focused on grammar analyses, rhetoric and, to a lesser extent, philosophy (Rosenblatt 1991).

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 socio-linguistic and emotional/psychological space.