World Englishes, Vol. 25, No. 3/4, pp. 501–511, 2006.

0883–2919

Language, identity, and education of Caribbean English speakers

SHONDEL NERO∗

ABSTRACT: The large-scale ongoing migration of Anglophone Caribbean natives to North America,
particularly to New York City, in the last two decades, has brought an influx of Caribbean English (CE)-
speaking students into US and Canadian schools and colleges. This article discusses the extent to which
such students, who publicly identify themselves as native speakers of English but whose variety of English
is often misunderstood by North American teachers, challenge the latter to examine their tacit assump-
tions about the English language, ownership of English, and linguistic identity. The author provides
examples of commonly used features of CE that are likely to create misunderstanding in American
classrooms. She argues that teachers of Caribbean English speakers will need to explore new paradigms
for language placement, assessment and development, and finally proposes an agenda for responding to
the linguistic and broader educational needs of CE-speaking students.

INTRODUCTION1
The following is an excerpt from a dialogue in the late Caribbean writer Samuel Selvon’s
(1956) novel, The Lonely Londoners. In this scene, Galahad, a Trinidadian immigrant in
England, is conversing with a White Englishwoman, Daisy, after their first date:

“You get that raise the foreman was promising you?” Galahad ask, for something to say.
“What did you say? You know it will take me some time to understand everything you say.
The way you West Indians speak!”
“What wrong with it?” Galahad ask. “Is English we speaking.” (cited in Morris, 1993: 18)

The exchange between Galahad and Daisy illustrates a curious clash of assumptions –
curious because Galahad assumes that he and Daisy speak a common language, that
is, English. But Daisy’s response to Galahad, suggesting that she could not understand
him, framed his language as “other,” “non-English” – in short, as nonnative, prompting
Galahad’s defensive retort, “Is English we speaking” – a retort that claims ownership of
English, but that, ironically, alienates him further from Daisy because of its nonstandard
phrasing. Just as Daisy asserts that she could not understand Galahad’s way of speaking,
so are many teachers challenged to understand the speech and/or writing of a rapidly
growing number of Anglophone Caribbean2 (also known as West Indian) immigrant
students in North American schools and colleges.
This article examines the extent to which linguistic misunderstandings between speakers
of different varieties of English (such as Daisy and Galahad) call into question assump-
tions about, and attitudes toward, non-American and non-British varieties of English, the
nature of English itself, linguistic identity, language, culture and ethnicity, and the

∗ St John’s University School of Education, Sullivan Hall Room 415, St John’s University, 8000 Utopia Parkway, Queens,
NY 11439, USA. E-mail: neros@stjohns.edu


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implications for language teaching. Caribbean English (CE) will be used as the main
reference point, although it should be noted that the linguistic and educational issues of
CE speakers in many ways parallel those of speakers of South Asian and African varieties
of English. In this paper, I propose a responsive educational agenda for CE speakers, one
that, among other things, validates different varieties of English in the classroom.

DEFINITION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF CARIBBEAN ENGLISH

Before examining the situation of CE speakers in school, a brief discussion of the
complex definition of CE itself, and then its status within the world Englishes paradigm,
is necessary. Caribbean English is a contact language emanating mainly from the encoun-
ter of British colonial masters with the enslaved and later indentured labor force brought
to the Caribbean to work on the sugar plantations. Because slavery largely eradicated the
ethnic languages of the exploited groups, the Creoles and Creole English that evolved in
the Caribbean became the vernacular, but more importantly, became publicly labeled as
English, because of the stigmatization of Creoles.
In The Oxford Companion to the English Language, Lawrence Carrington (1992) pro-
vides a definition of Caribbean English as “[a] general term for the English language used
in the Caribbean archipelago and circum-Caribbean mainland. In a narrow sense, it
covers English alone; in a broad sense it covers English and Creole” (pp. 191–3).
Carrington notes that the term is somewhat imprecise because of: (1) a long-standing
popular classification of varieties of Creole as dialects of English, sometimes called Creole
dialects or patois; (2) the existence of a continuum of usage between English and Creole
(known as a creole continuum); (3) the use by scholars of the term English to cover both, as
in the Dictionary of Jamaican English. By way of clarification, Carrington offers a list of
meanings embraced in the term CE: (1) regionally accented varieties of the standard
language (the acrolect); (2) localized forms of English; (3) mesolects between English
and Creole, as found in most communities; (4) kinds of English used in countries where
Spanish is dominant (e.g., English in Panama); (5) varieties of English-based Creole (the
basilect) (cited in Morris, 1993: 19).
Today, among Caribbean and other linguists, there is still debate about whether to
consider English-based Creoles dialects of English or separate languages. As Peter
Roberts (1988) notes, “The wide spectrum in Jamaica challenges the definition of a
language in that it calls into question the extent to which two speech varieties in a society
can differ and still be treated as belonging to the same language” (p. 9). The debate is
more political than linguistic, as has always been the case when discussions of language
vs. dialect come up. Mufwene (2001, 2004) offers an insightful discussion on what he
characterizes as “an insidious naming tradition,” noting that much of the debate about
whether Creoles and other new Englishes are labeled as separate languages or dialects of
English has to do with who is setting the norms (in this case, “non-native speakers”) rather
than anything inherent to the varieties themselves.
The average Caribbean person is not even aware that these academic debates on lan-
guage vs. dialect exist; they only encounter them when they are forced to consider
movements such as those in Jamaica to make Creole an official language, or when they
come to school in North America and are placed in an ESL class because their English

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“sounds” or “looks” nonnative; hence, the assumption that their home language is other
than English. This point will be taken up later.
Within the world Englishes paradigm, CE has been seen as somewhat unique. Braj
Kachru, for example, has noted the challenge of placing CE, partly because this variety
has evolved in ways quite unlike any of those in the three traditional concentric circles of
English. As Kachru (1992) notes, “[c]ountries such as South Africa or Jamaica are difficult
to place within the concentric circles. In terms of the English-using populations and the
functions of English, their situations are rather complex” (p. 362). The Caribbean closely
approximates the Outer Circle because of its history of British colonization, except that in
the Outer Circle countries, which are mostly in Asia and Africa, there is a more clear-cut
bilingual or multilingual population. In the Anglophone Caribbean, because Creole has
not been publicly recognized or accepted as a language in its own right, there is no
widespread popular perception of bilingualism per se (even though linguists and folklorists
assert the autonomous status of the Creole language). Thus, the linguistic situation in the
region may be characterized as bidialectal, where the majority of the population move
back and forth along the creole continuum engaging in what LePage and Tabouret-Keller
(1985) call “acts of identity,” that is to say, revealing through their use of language both
their personal identity and sense of social and ethnic solidarity and difference.
Historically, CE has been extensively treated in the literature on Pidgins and Creoles.
However, in the last two decades, there has been a growing recognition of CE as part of
the world Englishes family, evidenced by published articles on CE in World Englishes
(Clachar, 2003; Pratt-Johnson, 1993; Winford, 1997; Youssef, 2001). In this regard, we
can look forward to seeing a continuation of the trend toward more collaborative and
inclusive scholarship between Creole and world English scholars.

MIGRATION OF CARIBBEAN ENGLISH SPEAKERS

Today, because of migration and globalization, CE speakers are spread around the
world, especially in large metropolitan areas such as New York City, Toronto, and
London, and with their migration, they have brought their variety of English. The to-
tal population in the English-speaking Caribbean is approximately 5,000,000. Of this,
the largest influx of Anglophone Caribbean immigrants to the United States hails from
Jamaica (689,000 at the 2000 census count),3 and roughly 300,000 from Guyana, where
the author is from. In New York City alone, there are approximately 200,000 Guyanese.
This is a significant number given that the population of Guyana is less than one million.
For some Inner Circle schools and colleges, this influx of Anglophone Caribbean immi-
grants means that educators will encounter speakers and writers of English who see
themselves as very much part of the family of world Englishes, and feel a legitimate
claim to, and identification with, English, however different their variety of English is
from the standardized variety privileged in school.
Also within Caribbean communities, the question of linguistic identity is somewhat
complex. While speech at the basilectal level is typically denigrated because of its asso-
ciation with low socio-economic status and lack of education, the basilect and especially
the mesolect are often used to assert “true” Caribbean identity in informal and private
domains. This trend has been particularly visible since many Caribbean nations gained
independence during the 1960s. Thus, there is a contradictory impulse of simultaneously
denigrating and celebrating the vernacular, aptly characterized by Kachru and Nelson

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(2001) in comparing similar contradictory impulses elsewhere in the English-speaking

world as “attitudinal schizophrenia” (p. 15). At school, and in other formal and public
domains both in the Caribbean and elsewhere, most CE speakers identify with English,
and more importantly, think of themselves as native speakers of English. In the
Caribbean, educators understand CE speakers since they too are mostly from the local
community. In many cases, the first challenge to CE speakers’ identification with, and
use of, English is when they enter school or college in North America or England where
standardized American and British varieties of English are privileged.

CARIBBEAN ENGLISH: CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS

The encounter with CE speakers challenges three fundamental assumptions of many
teachers in North America and in the United Kingdom: (1) the assumption of the so-called
“native speaker” as inherently tied to race/ethnicity; (2) the assumption that English is
monolithic; (3) the assumption that only standardized English counts as English. First, the
notion of the native speaker has already been extensively challenged in the literature (refer
to work by Canagarajah, 1999; Davies, 1991; Ferguson, 1992; Kachru, 1986; Paikeday,
1985; Widdowson, 1994, and a host of others), yet many educators continue to hold on to
a racist notion that only speakers of European heritage (American or British) can be
considered native speakers of English. Hence, teachers are surprised when Caribbean
or other world English speakers such as Indians, Nigerians or Filipinos identify English
as their language, too – English, that is, as they have known, shaped, and used it. As
Widdowson (1994) eloquently put it, “The very fact that English is an international
language means that no nation can have custody over it . . . It is not a possession which
they [so-called native speakers] lease out to others, while still retaining the freehold. Other
people actually own it” (p. 385).
There seems to be a certain hierarchy of acceptance of English, which is tied to race and
ethnicity. In the opening dialog of this paper, Daisy claimed it would take her some time to
“understand” Galahad because of the way he spoke English. I suspect, though, that a
cockney speaker would be no more “understandable” to Daisy than Galahad, yet the
former would not be considered a nonnative speaker of English. Mufwene (2001) captures
this phenomenon best when he asserts, “the naming practice of new Englishes has to
do more with the racial identity of those who speak them than with how these varieties
developed and the extent of their structural deviations. It has little to do with how
mutually intelligible they are” (p. 107). This social construction of race as inherently
implicated in linguistic identity and in claims of language authority has direct implications
for how teachers view and assess Caribbean students’ language and, by extension, how the
students view and assess themselves.
The second assumption that is challenged by the presence of CE speakers is that English
is monolithic. While language diversity and change are inevitable, the notion that English
should “look like” or “sound like” one thing – the variety of English spoken by those in
power – is still pervasive. The particular syntax, pronunciation, lexical items and mean-
ings, and discourse norms of CE, even its standardized forms, challenge the monolithic
perception of English held by many North American teachers. In New York City all
public school children are required to complete a Home Language Information Survey
(HLIS) form. In my research, I have found that, generally, Anglophone Caribbean
students will list English only as their home language on the form, as opposed to, say,

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an Indian student who might list Gujarati and English, or even Gujarati alone. Caribbean
students’ self-ascribed public linguistic identity with English only often reinforces a dual
impulse in the minds of their American teachers. On the one hand, teachers might project
a high level of receptive and especially productive competence in standardized English on
them, and then penalize them if their work does not evidence such competence, especially
in writing. On the other hand, teachers might assume that their Caribbean students’
accented English is not “real” English because it “sounds” different than the teachers’
or, worse, because the CE speaker is likely non-European and an immigrant, and so they
approach and evaluate the students’ English as not merely different but deficient.
The third assumption challenged is that only standardized English counts as English.
Here, schools have been the chief culprits in perpetuating the notion that only proficiency
in the standardized prescriptivist grammar of English privileged in school, especially
evidenced in essayist literacy, counts as “real” English. Grammar functions, as
Widdowson (1994) observes, as the shibboleth in school. While teachers might be tolerant
of diversity in pronunciation or lexicon, they are less so of grammar, which reflects the
attitude in the society at large. To the extent that a Caribbean student does not display
proficiency in standardized grammar or displays a different grammar, particularly in
writing, she or he will be considered as not knowing how to write, or worse, not knowing
English at all. This is true, of course, for many speakers of English who are not proficient
in a standardized Inner Circle variety.

UNDERSTANDING CARIBBEAN ENGLISH

I will highlight here some of the salient features of CE that teachers might encounter,
and more importantly, discuss those areas that are likely to result in true misunderstand-
ing, and suggest an agenda that might help move us forward in terms of placement,
assessment, and language development in the classroom for CE speakers. To do so, I
will begin by citing an excerpt from my book (Nero, 2001), which documents a qualitative
study of four CE-speaking college students in New York City over a two-year period. The
excerpt is taken from the story of Charles, one of the four participants in the study:

In an autobiographical essay completed in his basic writing class, Charles Benjamin, a native of
Guyana, described his romantic relationship with a young woman, which eventually led to the
young woman’s pregnancy as follows: “So I started talking to a young lady and she got
pregnant.” Charles’ writing instructor responded to this statement with the comment, “big
jump,” suggesting there was a logical gap between Charles’ merely talking to the young woman
and her becoming pregnant. The implication here is that a process of acquaintance is normally
expected to take place over time before two people bear a child; hence the instructor expected
Charles to elaborate on that presumed acquaintance in transitional sentences. The instructor was
obviously unaware that Charles’ use of the word talking in this context carried the Guyanese
Creole English meaning of ‘getting to know, dating, and possibly becoming sexually involved
with.’ With this semantic load in mind, Charles felt that his choice of the word talking was per-
fectly logical, and so he found the instructor’s comment puzzling. The instructor, on the other
hand, read the word talking with the standardized English prototypical meaning, that is, to
“engage in conversation,” and so, quite innocently, missed Charles’ intended meaning. Ironically,
the very clarification implicitly requested by the instructor’s comment had already been
(mis)communicated. (p. 1)


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That Charles’ instructor misinterpreted his use of the word talking can be largely
attributed to the fact that she was unfamiliar with his variety of English. This exemplifies
Smith’s (1992) contention that “the greater the familiarity a speaker (native or non-native)
has with a variety of English, the more likely it is that s/he will understand, and be
understood by, members of that speech community” (p. 76). Smith was making the case
that there are three degrees of understanding on a continuum starting from intelligibility,
the lowest level (word/utterance recognition); then comprehensibility (word/utterance
meaning or locutionary force); then interpretability, the highest level (meaning behind
the word/utterance or illocutionary force) (p. 76). It is clearly at the interpretability level
that communication between Charles and his instructor broke down, which can only be
remedied by both Charles’ and the instructor’s becoming more familiar with each other’s
variety of English.
The confusion resulting from lexical items which appear to be regular standard English
words (such as talking in the example above) but carry Caribbean meaning is one of
the most common areas of miscommunication between North American educators and
Caribbean students. Winer (1993), who has researched Trinidadian Creole English exten-
sively, refers to such cases as “false friends.” A few more examples of false friends are
illustrated in Table 1 (SAE = Standard American English).
Palmer’s (1996) work on cultural linguistics has helped to shed light on this phenom-
enon of presumed understanding based on surface level linguistic familiarity. By taking as
a premise the notion that human language instantiates cultural conceptualizations, Palmer
argues that speakers from different backgrounds draw on different conceptualizations
when communicating with each other. The assumption, then, that interlocutors speaking/
writing the same language (in this case, English) are drawing on the same conceptual
systems is misguided, and can lead to the kinds of misunderstanding that occurred
between Charles and his instructor.
Another area that is often cited as a cause for misunderstanding is accent. Accent
differences, per se, do not generally cause misunderstanding, unless they are at the very
extreme ends of the spectrum. In the case of CE, it is the syllable-timed nature of
pronunciation (often referred to as the sing-song or lilting accent) as opposed to the
stress-timed nature of American English that can be unfamiliar to the non-Caribbean
ear. For example, the word condemn in standardized American English is normally
pronounced with primary stress on the second syllable. In CE, by contrast, both the

Table 1.Selected lexical items with corresponding CE and SAE meanings

Lexical item Meaning in CE Meaning in SAE

Hand Part of the body from the Part of the body from the wrist to the fingers
shoulders to the fingers
Foot Part of the body from the Part of the body from the ankles to the toes
Foot thighs to the toes
Tea Any hot beverage Specific beverage made from tea leaves
Pear Avocado A variety of fruit round at the base and
narrow toward the stem
Goblet Covered pitcher made of clay A drinking glass with a stem and base
in which water is kept cool


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first and second syllable would be given equal stress. This difference might simply require
more open-minded listening. Another example of marked pronunciation difference is the
dropping of word-initial “h” by some Jamaicans (as in “appy” for (happy) or “elp” for
(help), or adding an “h” elsewhere (as in “hegg” or “hoffice”). Normally, the intended
meaning can be inferred from the context. Pratt-Johnson (1993) cites a case in which a
Jamaican student in a math class in New York City pronounced the number 338 as “tree-
tree-hate,” after which she was teased by many of her classmates. Clearly, in the context of
a math class everyone knew what she meant.
In the classroom, because of the disproportionate focus on writing, CE-influenced
writing is heavily marked in the eyes of the teacher. Most of the time, this influence is
evidenced by zero inflection for tense, subject–verb concord, plurals, possessives, as well
as absence or minimum use of the passive voice, all of which rarely result in misunderstand-
ing. The negative judgment of these features is simply due to the fact that they do not
conform to prescriptive grammar conventions. These features are present in the writing of
most nonstandard dialect and basic writers, including those in the Inner Circle.
There are, however, two commonly used grammatical features that carry different
meanings in CE than in SAE. The first is the word does, which in CE, especially in
Guyana, is generally unstressed and used to signal habitual action or fact (Roberts,
1988), e.g., My friend does go to Syracuse University (which means ‘My friend goes to
Syracuse University’). In SAE, on the other hand, does is generally stressed to emphasize
contrast, e.g., does go as opposed to does not go. In one instance in my research on
Caribbean students’ writing, I found that the teacher simply crossed out the Caribbean
student’s use of the word does before the main verb, and replaced it with the simple
present tense form of the main verb. When I probed the teacher’s correction, she explained
that the student’s use of does struck her as an unnecessary emphasis (reading from a SAE
perspective) since there was no contrasting position established in the text; hence, she
removed what she perceived as a superfluous use of does. Although the teacher in this
case arrived at the student’s intended meaning, it should be noted that her motivation for
removing does countered the student’s reason for using it.
Another grammatical feature is the CE speaker’s use of the modal would, where in many
cases Americans would say will. Would has a much wider patterned use in CE, and has,
in fact, standardized. In Allsopp’s (1996) Dictionary of Caribbean English, he notes that
would has standardized in CE to signal a range of conditional instances. For example, I
received an e-mail from an American-born linguist who has lived and studied extensively
in the Caribbean, which read as follows: “I hope you would come to see me this summer.”
My husband, who is American, thought the use of would in this sentence was odd. He
assured me that most Americans would use will in this context. Being from the Caribbean
myself, the sentence was quite unmarked to my eyes and ear. Interestingly, in a recent
issue of World Englishes, Bautista (2004) reports on a study showing that would also has
wider usage in Philippine English. This reflects the dynamism of language, that is to say,
words can take on multiple grammatical (and semantic) functions in different contexts.

ADDRESSING THE NEEDS OF CE SPEAKERS IN SCHOOL

Several questions arise in the placement of CE speakers in US classrooms. First, there
are the practical matters that teachers must attend to: Where should these students be
placed? In an ESL class? A mainstream class? Or an English as a Second Dialect (ESD)

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class (if one exists at the school)? How should teachers respond to or evaluate writing and
speech that seems “marked” by CE-influenced features (which most teachers are perhaps
unable to identify)? What teaching strategies should be used to foster the Caribbean
students’ language development? How should/can educators find the right balance
between validating Caribbean students’ vernacular and teaching them standardized
American English? What are the most appropriate materials to use with such students?
These questions, however, cannot be addressed apart from the larger issues that con-
front both educators and students in the classroom. For instance, how do we confront the
ambivalent (and often negative) language attitudes vis-à-vis the vernacular internalized by
teachers and students alike? How do we confront the culture of power in the classroom
that privileges only one variety of English and perpetuates a unidirectional, static view of
language acquisition? How do we best prepare teachers to deal with CE and other forms of
linguistic diversity in the classroom, particularly teachers who have not had linguistic
training such as in TESOL programs? How do we access and appropriately utilize
resources for dealing with language diversity? Finally, how do we create a school culture
that helps Caribbean students transition effectively to American classrooms?
I do not claim to have definitive answers to all the questions I raise here, but I would
like to propose an agenda for a more linguistically and culturally responsive education
for the CE-speaking and similar populations. First, in terms of placement, I have argued
elsewhere (Nero, 2000) that the traditional ESL classroom is not an appropriate place for
helping CE speakers acquire standardized American English, because of the fact that their
receptive knowledge and to a large extent their productive, oral skills in English far exceed
those of the traditional ESL student (e.g. a Spanish or Chinese speaker); also their self-
identification as native speakers of English makes them less motivated to learn English
defined as a “second” language. Peirce (1995) argues forcefully that a person’s investment
in learning a language is an investment in his or her own evolving social identity, and to
the extent that Anglophone Caribbean students already identify with a variety of English,
they are less likely to make a deliberate investment in learning it as a separate language.
Rampton (1985) critically examined similar placement issues vis-à-vis British Asian
speakers of English, arguing that “the putative home/school language divide” (p. 188) –
English being spoken at school, and the mother tongue being used exclusively at home – is
misguided. He asserts that “in reality Asian children might be speaking English at home a
great deal” (p. 188), and in fact, “the majority of British Asian youngsters cannot now be
classified as ESL learners” (p. 195).
Nonetheless, with regard to CE, it should be noted that there are some Caribbean
linguists who strongly believe that CE speakers are, in fact, speaking another language,
and therefore should be placed in an ESL class (Devonish, 1986; Folkes, 2004). I believe,
however, that CE speakers should be placed in mainstream classes with teachers who
have been trained in linguistic diversity, including world Englishes, through ongoing staff
development. Such training is particularly needed in metropolitan areas with large popu-
lations of Caribbean immigrants like New York City, Miami, Atlanta, Toronto, and
London. Training should include becoming familiar with (1) Caribbean culture, beyond
what Winer calls the “sun and fun” exotic view of the Caribbean; (2) prototypical fea-
tures of CE; and (3) speech community discourse norms, including nonverbal communi-
cation (e.g., direct eye contact with the teacher or an adult is considered rude in Caribbean
schools, which is very different from American schools). The hiring of Caribbean teachers,
as has been done in some New York City public schools, is also helpful in this regard.

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Caribbean teachers can serve as cultural brokers in the classroom, helping to bridge the
linguistic and cultural gap between teachers and students. Their partnership with
American teachers can also build cross-cultural understanding.
In terms of teaching and assessment strategies for language and literacy development, I
offer the following suggestions based on my own work with New York City teachers:
• Probe students for clarification whenever pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary features
impede communication (as was the case with Charles and his instructor).
• Use dialect features and discourse patterns found in students’ speech and writings to discuss
their appropriateness for various genres and audiences and to compare and contrast the
rhetorical styles used in the home and school cultures. For an insightful discussion of sensi-
tivity to various cultural rhetorical styles within the educational arena, see Fox (1994). Hinkel’s
(1999) volume on the role of culture in second language writing also sheds light in this area.
• Use alternative forms of assessment that are inclusive of all varieties of English, including the
standard variety.
• Have students read, write, and share stories in their variety of English as well as standard
English. This shows varieties of Englishes in juxtaposition rather than opposition. Encourage
students to research their community language through projects and interviews with family and
community members.
• Use material and literature in class by writers using different varieties of English. (e.g., Achebe,
Naipaul, Grace Nichols, etc.). This also validates the multiplicity of Englishes.
• Provide reference sources in the classroom on various Englishes, e.g., The Dictionary of
Caribbean English Usage, The American Heritage Dictionary, Dictionary of South African
English, etc.
• Provide multiple opportunities for reading and writing in the classroom. Introduce students to
the writing process.

One way that the larger issues that confront educators in the classroom from a linguistic
perspective can be addressed is to make language itself a focus of study – language, that is,
in its broadest sense, and not just its form. It is interesting that language is the medium of
study and the principal yardstick by which we measure academic achievement in school, yet
language use and language prejudice are rarely problematized in the classroom, outside of
sociolinguistic courses. Wolfram (1990, 1993, 2004) has long advocated dialect diversity
study in schools as one way to understand, legitimize and affirm language variation. I echo
Wolfram’s sentiments in that we can only begin to confront language prejudice if we are
prepared to encourage honest, open dialog in the classroom about language diversity,
language use, and language attitudes, especially those negative attitudes toward non-
American and non-British varieties of English that have been internalized by many, includ-
ing their own speakers. This, I am sure, will not be easy but it certainly underlies the hidden
curriculum in schools, where negative judgments are routinely made on the speakers of these
“other” varieties of English. An honest dialog about language will allow students to see that
the privileging of one variety of English in school is not accidental. And while students have
every right to acquire a standardized variety of English, they should also know that that
variety is implicated in power relations and not inherently superior; that language prejudice
merely indexes race and class-based and other prejudices in the society at large.
The agenda being proposed here undoubtedly comes with challenges. For one thing, in
terms of CE speakers, there are concrete challenges to be faced such as:
• defining the population (who speaks Creole or Creole English?);
• identifying their needs;

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• placing students appropriately;

• getting all teachers sufficiently trained in language diversity;
• finding culturally relevant and appropriate material;
• allowing ample time to implement strategies for literacy development;
• CE speakers’ resentment at being placed in ESL class if that occurs;
• CE speakers’ skepticism about American teachers telling them about their own dialect;
• the perception that teachers are validating nonstandard varieties of English in school in a
culture that preaches “standard American English only” allowed in school.

These challenges, however, are a necessary part of the educational process. I believe that
only by finding a space for various Englishes in the classroom can we lessen the likelihood
of linguistic misunderstanding and simultaneously affirm our Caribbean students’ and
other world English speakers’ linguistic/cultural identity, which is the basis for culturally
responsive education.

NOTES
1. This report is adapted from a presentation under the same title given at the International Association for
World Englishes Conference at Syracuse University on July 17, 2004.
2. By Anglophone Caribbean, I am referring to the former British colonies in the Caribbean region, as well as the
mainland countries of Belize in Central America and Guyana in South America, in all of which English
remains the official language.
3. All demographic statistical data are taken from the US. 2000 Census Data at http://www.census.gov.

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