Although the official language of Trinidad is English, the vast majority of the population speaks Trinidadian English Creole (TEC) as a first or sole language. Varieties of international standard English, standard Trinidadian English, and TEC, overlap in areas of lexicon, phonology and grammar, but TEC has a basically different grammatical system not always recognized as distinct because of superficial formal similarities (Carrington [7], Solomon [27], Winford [30]).

This set of three primary school language arts books has been in print for several years, and has thus been tested in real language classrooms throughout the Caribbean. My own direct experience with these books in classrooms has been in Toronto, where they are used with some adolescent literacy classes in standard English as a second dialect.