A US$13,463 grant from the American Friends of Jamaica (AFJ) will help the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, digitize teacher training and support English teaching in Creole-speaking communities.
The funding will support the Professional Development for Primary School Teachers (PDPST) programme, which is expected to launch within the next six to nine months. The initiative will provide free, online training materials aligned with the Language Arts curriculum in Jamaican primary schools, using a linguistics-based approach.
The UWI was among 54 institutions awarded a share of US$740,000 in grant funding at the AFJ’s Grant Awards Ceremony, held April 8 at the United States Embassy in Kingston.
The programme, originally piloted in 2015 with a second workshop series in 2019, was developed after former Education Minister Ronald Thwaites requested assistance in addressing low literacy rates in primary schools.
“We recognise that teachers are prepared to teach Language Arts as if children speak English. That’s how they have been trained. So, although they acknowledge the presence of Jamaican Creole in their classrooms, they’re not trained in any way to work with Jamaican Creole,” said Professor Silvia Kouwenberg, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Education.
“They don’t have any deep knowledge or explicit knowledge of the grammar of Jamaican Creole. They only have the implicit knowledge that a native speaker has and what then happens in the classrooms is that children who speak grammatical Jamaican Creole are treated as children who speak ungrammatical English because teachers do not have a choice. So, at the core, what we want is for teachers to become aware of this language situation and its implications,” she added.
Professor Kouwenberg emphasized that failing to acknowledge Jamaican Creole as a foundation prevents teachers from building on students’ existing language skills. “Children come to the classroom speaking Jamaican Creole and that ought to be the stepping stone from which they are taught English but, instead, it ends up being treated as a hindrance,” she said.
Dr. Yewande Lewis-Fokum, literacy specialist in the School of Education, said the workshops were well received by teachers in Kingston and western Jamaica.
“They saw the relevance of the content and the pedagogy. It allowed them to reflect on their own language journeys and their own knowledge of the different systems of a language, the sound, the phonology, the morphology, the syntax and the semantics,” she said.
One participating school reported noticeable improvement in their students’ performance on the Grade Four Literacy Test after using reading comprehension strategies like read-alouds and directed reading thinking activities.
Sashann Dixon, a PhD candidate in educational linguistics who took part in the second round of workshops, said teachers were “very enthusiastic about the project and the content.”
“I remember very clearly them expressing a joy to just be able to see the difference between the languages, some of which internally they already made notes of; some of the things that happened in the classroom, but they don’t have the linguistic tools to really carry that in the classroom and use it to their advantage,” she said.
Professor Kouwenberg noted that while the face-to-face format was rich in content, some teachers found it overwhelming, which prompted the push to digitize the materials. The new online format will allow for self-paced learning and can also be used in structured professional development workshops.
Thanking the AFJ for its support, Professor Kouwenberg added, “It is critical for the materials to be accessible to all primary teachers, as every time there is a report that talks about literacy, it is scathing about the learning outcomes.”
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