R. Anthony Lewis, Contributor

This is in response to the letter by my French teaching colleague and president of the Jamaica Association of French Teachers (JAFT), Desrine Bogle-Cayol, published in this newspaper on Saturday, April 14. In her letter, Mrs. Bogle-Cayol draws attention to the poor performance of Jamaican students in English-language exams set by regional and overseas examination bodies. She suggests that the poor performance in English has an impact on students' performance in foreign languages. Distilled, Mrs. Bogle-Cayol's argument is that students learn language by building skills in the language with which they are most familiar, transferring those skills to subsequent languages.

Understood as a plea for improved proficiency in language, the letter expresses a reasonable concern. But that is not all it says. From the sensible position about transferring language skills acquired early to aid the learning of subsequent languages, she muddles the argument by expressing caution about the use of Jamaican, the language with which most Jamaican students are familiar, as a language of instruction in the classroom.

It is a contradiction to suggest that students do badly in Spanish or French because they do not master the conventions of English, without also acknowledging that they do badly in English because they have not been formally introduced to the conventions of language via their first language, Jamaican. Since the approach to teaching language in Jamaica has been dominated by a practice that assumes English to be the language with which students are most familiar, it seems highly likely that the essential problem that all of us as second and foreign-language educators face is the lack of integration of their actual first language, Jamaican, into the language-learning process.

Mastery of English impaired

The proposal made by those of us who support the introduction of Jamaican as a language of instruction is simply that the first language of any individual, while important in its own right, also serves as the basic means by which that individual acquires cognitive skills relevant to the learning of other languages. William Stewart's 1969 claim that learning to read may be rendered infinitely more difficult by a tradition of writing primarily or exclusively in some language other than the one which the population normally learns to speak, is particularly applicable here. This suggests that in the Jamaican language-learning context, where we have had English-only instruction year after year, mastery of English by most students will continue to be impaired unless there is meaningful introduction of their first language into education.

Nonetheless, it must be noted that there is no plan to have Jamaican replace English. No one that I know who supports first-language instruction has ever been a proponent of the ludicrous idea of educating an entire populace in Creole alone, as Mrs. Bogle-Cayol's letter implies. This is a red herring that many use to defend the language-education status quo, while our students continue to fail or shun English, Spanish and French. That a language-education colleague drags this same red herring into the debate is not only surprising, but also disappointing.

Another point of concern about Mrs. Bogle-Cayol's letter is her choice of language areas to compare with Jamaica. She uses Haiti and two of the French Departments of America, Guadeloupe and Martinique, to demonstrate the folly of introducing Jamaican into the classroom. Why she did not use as examples Curaao, with its Papiamento, Dutch, English and Spanish, or Tanzania, with its native (Bantu) languages, Swahili and English, is not clear. It seems to my mind that illustrations from these societies with multilingual education models might have been more appropriate.

Need for trilingual model

Because the skills of properly arranging thoughts are best learnt in one's primary language, and because Jamaicans need to communicate with the rest of the Americas and the world, the Jamaican language-education situation seems to suggest the need for a trilingual model. This would comprise Jamaican as the base language, English as the mandatory second language for international communication, and Spanish or French as a preferred foreign language for regional communication.

Let me state that it is banal to assert the importance of teaching English. We have been teaching the language for more than a century and a half without significantly impacting our students' proficiency in it. In this regard, Lena McCourtie's 1998 article on the state of English language education in Jamaican education between 1891 and 1921 and the 1990s is an important contribution to the discussion. She laments the fact tha the acquisition of English has been seen as "essential to pupils' success," no new mechanisms have been put in place to "maximise pupils' language development". This should tell us something about the nature of the problem we face and our prescriptions for solving it.

What is therefore important for us as language educators is to research and engage strategies that ensure our students learn not only English, but also the other languages that will give them access to all possible worlds around them, including their own. Until that research demonstrates, contrary to what has been found elsewhere, that using a first language in education harms second and foreign-language learning, let's refrain from Jamaican bashing.

R. Anthony Lewis (Ph.D.) is Head, Foreign Languages Division, University of Technology.