This paper discusses initial findings on teacher identity as perceived and discussed by six participants: three overseas trained teachers (OTTs), one secondary headteacher, one local authority director, and one senior policy officer in the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) who is a qualitative researcher at a prestigious London university. Through systematic reflection, each individual explores the potential gains which accrue to OTTs as part of their teaching experiences in England in order to make sense of their “new” emerging teacher identities.

This paper brings together the experiences of children, teachers, and parents in two very different schools in Jamaica—one primary and one preparatory. The data are taken from two larger qualitative studies. The first, An Exploration of Two Classrooms: Cases in Classroom Management, is a case study of a grade 5 teacher’s classroom management strategies in a government primary school and her interaction with four of her students—selected because they were highly responsive and promised to be information-rich respondents.

In the process of reviewing a course in classroom assessment offered as part of a programme leading to a Diploma in Teaching, the need to reconcile a constructivist-behaviourist tension that was embedded in the course became evident. The tension resulted from the course designers’ effort to replace a course in classroom testing and measurement that was more behaviouristic with one that emphasized a constructivist approach to assessment.

The expressive arts have long been a valued part of the Caribbean culture. In the last two to three decades in particular, there has been growing belief that the arts are integral to the development of personal and national identity. Academics and politicians see the arts as tools for nation building, even if at times the processes needed to develop artistic sensibilities and artistic enterprises are given less attention and financial support than they warrant.

This issue of the Caribbean Journal of Education includes articles that examine a range of issues related to socialization and the lives of teachers and young people, music education, and the design and evaluation of education programmes. It also includes for the first time, abstracts of dissertations completed by students in the School of Education. Publication of abstracts of research conducted by students of the School will be a regular feature of future issues of the Journal.
 

The reception to the teaching of Hindi in Trinidad has been mixed: enthusiasm, indifference, scepticism and resistance. While Hindi is accepted as part of the culture of people of Indian ancestry, it is not generally regarded as a language that merits the same attention afforded to Spanish, which has now been formally declared the “First Foreign Language of Trinidad and Tobago”2 . The promotion of Hindi has been associated with religious and cultural identity and ethnicity.

This article reports on some of the findings of the Foreign Language Teaching Survey (FLTS), which targeted foreign language teachers in secondary schools in Trinidad and Tobago. It provides a first look at the ensemble of professional and academic backgrounds of respondent teachers and speaks to the present FL classroom and the entities and issues that feed into it as the teacher sees it. The survey constitutes an attempt to construct an empirical picture of the institutionalized foreign language situation in Trinidad and Tobago as well as capture the teacher’s perspective.

This article gives a general presentation of the methodology and the selection criteria used to establish the French Learner Oral Corpus project that I developed between 2002 and 2004, while a lecturer at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona.* This research project stems from my interest in understanding the acquisition of oral competence among students of French at this institution, and my dissatisfaction with a lack of objective data to characterize precisely the linguistic features of their oral inter language.

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.