Use creole to teach effectively

THE EDITOR, Sir:

On Friday, July 27, The Gleaner reported, under the caption 'Mek Patois official an dun', the deputy speaker of the House of Represen-tative, Lloyd B. Smith, as renewing the call for Jamaican Creole to receive official language status.

As I had expected, militant English-onlyists, in irrational fear of Jamaican Creole, attacked Mr Smith's suggestion without any indication of having given consideration to its possible merits.

Do allow me to reproduce, from The Gleaner website, an unedited response to Mr Smith's call by one such guardian of the English language. He/she goes by the name 'Jambad':

"Mr Smith all a sudden becomes the poster boy of the Gleaner there seems to be an effort to redeem is poor showing in Parliament. Yesterday he was feature suggesting that Montego Bay should have a high court, today he is prominently displayed again, now he wants Patois to be Jamaica's official language. Surely there are more important topics need coverage, the leading newspaper should be able to do better than that. Unfortunately, the public are kept in the dark by trivial reporting. when the JLP was in power the reportings were all about crimes, corruptions, bad roads and no water supplies what has change."

Jambad's errors in grammar, spelling and punctuation betray him/her! Unfortunately, English-onlyists of the Jambadian tradition abound; their inability to produce standard English in spoken and written form is a testimony to the linguistic wonderland in which we live.

One of the ways in which we can address our language crisis is by using Jamaican Creole as a bridge to teaching English as a mandatory second language. The official recognition of Jamaican Creole could be one of the first steps in that direction, as a more formal recognition of the language could compel our educators to come up with a more structured approach to the teaching of English.

BERTRAM GAYLE

bertram_gayle@biblesocietywi.org

Coordinator, Jamaican Creole Translation Project