Towards endonormative standards of English in the Caribbean: a study of students' beliefs and school curricula

Abstract

Like other former British colonies, Anglophone Caribbean countries like Trinidad & Tobago (T&T) and Jamaica are in a process of reorientation from Standard British English towards endonormative standards. This paper investigates the present stage in this process on the basis of a survey of students' beliefs about standard varieties of English. These were found to be rather mixed, indicating that the belief in an exonormative standard still lingers on while awareness of endonormative standards is gaining ground. School curricula are also examined. Primary school curricula in both T&T and Jamaica are found to include various aspects that, if fully implemented, should help raise awareness of the local nature and relevance of Standard English at an age-appropriate level. Jamaican curricula also explicitly recognise a national standard variety as the target, which is not the case in T&T's curricula, one reason probably being that the Jamaican standard has more linguistic research to support it. The regional advanced secondary curriculum covers major aspects of the language situation in the Anglophone Caribbean but national and regional aspects of Standard English could be addressed more explicitly.

Keywords:

• Caribbean
• Trinidad & Tobago
• Jamaica
• Standard English
• language attitudes
• curricula

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ryan Durgasingh and Janielle Garcia (University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad) as well as Hubert Devonish and Karen Carpenter (University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica) for help in carrying out the survey reported on in this paper. Furthermore, I am grateful to Guyanne Wilson and the anonymous reviewers for useful comments on earlier drafts. Any remaining shortcomings are my own responsibility.

Notes

In Jamaica, Creole literacy has been exceptionally taught in a few primary school classes participating in the Jamaican Language Unit's Bilingual Education Project (Devonish & Carpenter, 2010).

Note that the students in the present sample may have taken either CAPE or GCE Advanced Level examinations, which CAPE has now replaced. Introduced by the CXC in 1998, CAPE examinations have generally been taken by students at this level in Jamaica since 2003 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Jamaica), and in T&T since 2006, according to a local informant.

Secondary school curricula describe the official language and target of teaching in the country as ‘Internationally Accepted English’ (Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, Ministry of Education, 2008, p. 22, 2009, p. 28). A recent consultancy document does once mention a ‘Trinidad and Tobago Standard English’, however (Robertson, 2010, p. 37). This document also observes that ‘[t]he official language is ill defined in that even among the classroom exemplars there is no consensus about which version of English, British, American, International or National and Regional should be the target’ (Robertson, 2010, p. 25).

Pollard (2003) is cited in an earlier, Roberts (1988) in a later print.