Language Education in the Caribbean: Selected Articles by Dennis Craig is a carefully selected collection of the writings of the late Dennis Craig (1929–2004). Edited by Jeannete Allsopp and Zellynne Jennings, the book contains eight of Craig’s “most representative articles” with a focus on language education in the Commonwealth Caribbean. The book is a rich resource for its intended audience of language teachers, creolists, practitioners and researchers in the field of Caribbean language education.

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 forms part of a larger research study which examined the role of discourse in the changes made to the administration of the Grade Four Literacy Test (G4LT) in 2009 in Jamaica. The literacy test was modified from a classroom-based assessment to a high-stakes nationwide examination. While the broader study focused on changes at the policy level, and how the test changes were discussed in the print media, this paper will focus on how the modifications to the G4LT influenced changes at the level of the school.