Ja hits language barrier
Pat Roxborough, Staff Reporter
WESTERN BUREAU Local educators are struggling to agree on a successful method of teaching Jamaican students to master Stan-dard English, the official language. The latest method being contemplated is known as TESOL - teaching English as a second language. At the heart of the issue is the role that the Jama-ican dialect or creole should play in the classroom and the feasibility of TESOL. However, TESOL has not found favour with some English teachers who flunk it for being time and resource consuming. English teachers at a number of high schools, including Holy Childhood, Merle Grove, Jona-than Grant, Happy Grove and Queens told The Sunday Gleaner last week that while they acknowledged the existence of creole, TESOL was not being used in their schools. "It is all well and good to talk about using teaching English as a second language (method), but where is the equipment? Where are the tape recorders, where is the extra time going to come from?" asked a senior English teacher who did not want to be named for this story. Senior secretary for administration and communication at the Jamaica Teachers Association, Adolf Ca-meron, agreed that it would be hard to implement TESOL without the proper resources. Variables "I accept that children go to school with a language that is not school language and I don't see a problem approaching the language from this angle," he said. "At the same time, one must appreciate that there are many variables to be considered. The teaching materials, for one. This method requires a lot of resources." TESOL, which acknowledges the student's mother tongue as a first language, would, in the Jamaican context, highlight the grammatical and structural differences between creole and Standard English. The issue of finding a method to teach Jamaican students to master English, which is more than 20 years old, has been kept alive by the consistently poor performance that the overwhelming majority of Jamaican students have been registering in the English exams set by the Caribbean Examinations Coun-cil (CXC). For the last five years, CXC, the regional examining body for secondary and high school students, has concluded in its annual reports on performance of the region that "the greatest weakness of the candidates is their inability to maintain a consistent level of acceptable English." Jamaican students have been failing that subject consistently. Of the 26,257 who sat English language last year, 39.03 per cent earned passing grades, which was an improvement over the previous year when 30.04 per cent of those who sat it passed. TESOL has yet to gain full acceptance by teachers in the public school system, although at a number of workshops and seminars on the issue, reading specialists and other linguistic experts have been recommending its use. "Sad to say, this method is not widely used. It is effective, but it is time consuming and the national approach to the issue of teaching English is rather uncertain...I don't know what we are going to do," said reading specialist, Joyce Chang, who teaches at the Shortwood Teachers College in Kingston, last week. Dr. Simon Clarke, advisor to the Education Ministry, said there should be a combination of TESOL and the traditional methods of teaching grammar. "Experiments over the years suggest that it (TESOL) is a very powerful way of getting the message across," he said. But teacher-training institutions like the Sam Sharpe Te-achers College in Montego Bay and the Northern Caribbean University (NCU) in Mandeville have incorporated some aspects of TESOL in programmes they offer. According to Beatrice Hines, who lectures at the NCU, a key aspect of the English course that teachers of English must subscribe to deals with language in the Caribbean. "The creole situation poses a big problem with concord, structure, vocabulary and spelling. What we do is use what the child already knows and then use creative methods - parallel structures to help him understand the language," she said. Come September, the Educa-tion Ministry will implement its Reform of Secondary Education (ROSE) project, which will introduce a common curriculum that will be taught in all schools from grade seven to grade nine. According to Jackie Cousins, an official in the Ministry, ROSE's Language Arts programme will use TESOL "in some regards but not totally." 
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