Review: Allsopp, J. & Jennings, Z. (eds.) Language Education in the Caribbean: Selected Articles by Dennis Craig. Jamaica, Barbados & Trinidad and Tobago: University of the West Indies Press

Language Education in the Caribbean opens with a preface highlighting Craig’s proactive social engagement through a discussion of his popular Viewpoint columns written for the Guyana Broadcasting Company and an introduction outlining the main concerns of his academic publications. It then reprints four of his articles dealing with the socio-linguistic context of the English-official Caribbean and four focusing on effective teaching and learning policies and approaches for this context. With respect to the first issue, Craig echoes the creole continuum perspective and argues that the English-official Caribbean is characterized by variation between Standard English and local creoles resulting from creole speakers’ “striving for social status through English” (p. 17) and inappropriate teaching methods. This has given rise to a third system, the “interaction area” (p. 17) or the mesolect(s); children from creole dominant homes mistakenly equate it with English and thus face problems in school where Standard English norms are enforced. Craig argues that all three varieties share the same conceptual base but make use of different grammatical principles and lexical forms to express it. The creole and creole-influenced varieties (or mesolects) mostly share the same grammar and mainly differ on the lexical level. Thus shifting simply entails substituting English-like lexical forms for creole ones. However, since there are significant structural differences between the creole and English forms, acquisition of English requires learning of a set of new procedures, rules, and principles.