Our reality... how can we teach students Standard English when so many different varieties of the creole exist???

Teaching language and literacy in vernacular situations: Participant of an in-service teacher’s workshop by Dennis R. Craig provides some very useful information for teachers of the Caribbean.

1. It highlights the problem of teaching language and literacy in the Caribbean where many varieties of English based creoles exist.

2. He purports that this problem is amplified because of the simultaneous changes that have been occurring in the traditional standard variety of English and because liberalism has facilitated the acceptance of the creoles so that they became the norm ( Craig p.4)and because from the 1970s communicative and whole language approaches to teaching “...left a vaccum...about what best to do in language and literacy education” (Craig p.5).

3. The article then seeks to offer a solution to this void by advocating that the best policy in language education is “...not to go wholesale for any one method or approach” (Craig p.5), but to select strategies that meet the specific needs of learners regardless of the historical origins of the approaches (Craig p.5).

I agree that in order for us to be effective at combatting the literacy crisis that exists in our country, we need to use a variety of methods. Please share with me the method(s) you have used successfully.