Dialect Interference in St. Lucian Primary Schools

Chris Winch

King’s College London

May 2016

The Caribbean Sea

The St. Lucian Educational Context

St. Lucia spends approximately 50% of its annual budget on

education (1990); about $45,500,000 EC or £10,100,000. Of

this sum about £5,500,000 is spent on primary education or

about one quarter of the annual national budget (Government

of St. Lucia, 1990). In 1989-90 a total of 32,649 students

between the ages of 4 to 11 were enrolled in state primary

schools. About £168.50 is spent per annum of each primary

child's education compared with the British figure of about

£862.50 (1987-88) (Central Office of Information, 1989).

Why the Creole Interference Hypothesis?

• It is a form of deficit theory about the verbal abilities of the population.

• It is combined with views about the superiority of Standard English.

• Arguably, it serves as a proxy for explanations of economic underdevelopment.

Analogies with the UK

• There has been a persistent view in the UK that dialect interference from speech has an impact on writing ability.

• As in the post-colonial context, this has been offered as an explanation of working class pupil underperformance.

• It is often confounded with theories of verbal deficit and reflects confusion about the role of Standard English in school.

Some Big Themes in Sociolinguistic Research

• Language Use and Educability

• The Verbal Deficit Hypothesis

• Differences between Spoken and Written Language

Speaking and Writing

• Audience (distant or present?) The importance of genre in writing.

• Context (present or absent?)

• Transient or permanent?

• Surveyable or non-surveyable?

Background to the Creole Interference Hypothesis

• It assumes that standard English is superior to dialects (but in what respect?).

• It assumes that written language is superior to spoken language (but in what respect?).

• Creoles: forms of European language modified by African syntax and morphology. See Figure 1 in the article

Challenges in Researching the CIH

• What is the issue? – formation of appropriate hypotheses.

• Development of an appropriate explanatory framework.

• The prevalence of longstanding debates which could either clarify or obscure the issue. These include debates about the relationship of orality to literacy and various forms of verbal deficit theory.

Challenges in Researching the CIH

• Developing an explanatory framework?

• Untangling possible patterns of causal dependence. Need to distinguish phenomenon and cause of the phenomenon.

• Deciding between competing possible explanations for the phenomena.

• Conceptualising and assessing quality in writing.

Challenges in Researching the CIH

• Access – a sensitive issue nationally.

• Access - a sensitive issue for schools. Informed consent and anonymity.

• Literature review – importance of in situ access to local research from various sources. This was especially important in identifying creole interference phenomena.

Responding to the Challenges?

• How would you go about:

• Selecting writing tasks

• Distinguishing between errors and causes of errors in writing

• Distinguishing between possible creole interference errors in writing and other possible forms of error?

• Enhancing the validity of your study.

Looking at the Data

• Each pack is organised by school.

• Examples of both tasks are present.

• There are researchers’ notes and error analyses within each pack.

The Letter of Complaint.

You have bought a bottle of juice at the shop and you found that it didn't taste right and that you couldn't drink it.

Write a letter to the shopkeeper, complaining that your drink was not nice and asking for your money back.

Story Completion Task

Amos walked along the beach to inspect the damage caused by the hurricane.

He saw a huge whale lying on the beach and knew at once that it was his old friend Boris. They looked at one another with surprise and sadness in their eyes.

'Help me Amos', said Boris, 'If I don't get back in the water, then I'm going to die'.

• Write a story which describes how Amos rescued Boris. He knew that nearby there was a zoo with some elephants who might help him.

Task 1: Error Analysis

• Take 10 minutes to familiarise yourself with the material.

• Working in groups of two, take three scripts from each category (letter and story), identify errors and make a tentative classification of them.

Task 2: Assessing Writing Quality.

• Make a random choice of three scripts from each category.

• Working individually, assign an impression mark to each (5 high quality ---- 1 low quality).

• Compare and discuss your findings with your partner. Discuss the criteria that you have used and how reliable and valid you think they are.

• Consider possible alternative ways of assessing writing quality.

Methodology

• Broadly Popperian: to see if the CIH could be corroborated. If not, then strictly speaking, the CIH was refuted.

• Two issues – errors in writing and quality of writing.

• We decided to treat these two separately and to see if there were any correlations between the two.

• Challenge: to identify the likely cause of an error.

Hypotheses

• Working hypothesis: underlying sources of error could plausibly be attributed to 7 possible causes (p.162).

• Null hypothesis 1. No relationship between impression marks and creole interference.

• Null hypothesis 2. No relationship between impression marks and secretarial errors.

• Null hypothesis 3. No relationship between impression marking and errors due to the misunderstanding of writing as opposed to speaking conventions.

• What happens if a null hypothesis is rejected?

Methodology

• Possible creole interference errors were culled from wider and from local academic literature with one exception (IFP).

• Possible alternative sources of these errors were postulated.

• Possible CI errors were counted and correlated with impression marks.

• The same exercise was carried out in an English school (why?).

Methodology

• Explanation. English children do not speak creole. They make very similar errors to St. Lucian children. There is a similar correlation of impression mark with errors and error frequencies.

• The broader literature identifies developmental errors in writing identical or very similar to some ‘creole interference’ errors.

• Inference to the best explanation of the phenomena.

The Findings

• Few of the error categories could be unambiguously assigned to creole interference.

• Numbers of CIH errors were small (see Table 5, p.168).

• Errors were correlated with impression marks but some errors were correlated with high impression marks.

• Little difference was found in distribution of impression marks and errors between the St. Lucian and the English schools.

The Findings

• NH1 corroborated: no strong relationship between impression mark and possible creole interference errors.

• NH2: no strong relationship between quantity of secretarial errors and impression mark.

• NH3: no strong relationship between errors due to misunderstanding conventions of writing and impression mark.

• What can we infer from these results?

• What further investigations would be useful to learn more about the plausibility of the CIH?