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.

Educators venture into the next millennium guided by a paradigm shift of changing student needs. As a consequence, literacy practitioners need to be creative in their instructional approaches, altering conventional teaching methods and embracing new innovations within the classroom. Designing multimedia classrooms developed within a theoretical framework of sociocultural constructivism is one answer.

The writers identify the aim of their efforts as seeking to place the discussion of the phenomenon of a gap between the academic underachievement of Whites and Blacks in the context of post-industrial societies. Post-industrialism is set in the post-1970s, defined with reference to a paradigm shift.

The aim of this study was to establish how well students' GSAT language arts scores predicted their future performance on CSEC English A and to determine the impact of students' level of literacy, based on their GSAT language arts score, on their performance on CSEC English A. Using a longitudinal methodology, the performance of four cohorts of students was traced from primary through secondary schools. The results revealed a strong correlation between performance on the GSAT language arts and CSEC English A.

Based on the Language Experience and Awareness approach, the Literacy 1–2–3 (L1–2–3) was designed for use in the Language Arts Window in a constructivist teaching/learning environment in Jamaican primary schools. Based on a review of studies on L1–2–3, this paper examined the extent to which characteristics of the innovation, local characteristics, and external factors impacted the effectiveness of its implementation.

This article summarizes a keynote address that I delivered at the 2013 Literacy Symposium on 22 March 2013 at the University of West Indies at Mona. It builds on the conference’s them: “Literacy for Peace, Progress, and Prosperity.” Although the desire for peace is a lofty, noble, and important goal, it is a complicated process and many systemic, deeply rooted, and inequitable realities interfere with this goal.