Balancing composition and grammar in the UTech Jamaica classroom.

Daidrah Smith Michelle Stewart-McKoy

Michelle Stewart-McKoy

Creole Composition: Academic Writing and Rhetoric in the Anglophone Caribbean.

Vivette Milson-Whyte, Raymond Oenbring & Brianne Jaquette

Parlor Press

2019

Students’ performance on tertiary level Academic Writing modules within Jamaica and across the wider Caribbean has been described using adjectives such as ‘poor’, ‘atrocious’, and ‘substandard’, among others. This usually is as a result of the wide variety of errors that seem to permeate students’ writing. Such performance often triggers discussions and sometimes even heated debates surrounding the nature and causes of, as well as possible corrective measures for the English language challenges faced by students at the tertiary level. Academics at tertiary institutions within the Caribbean have for centuries been conflicted over whether or not to the teach grammar, and if so, how much grammar to teach. This debate seems as old as the field of rhetoric, with writers such Kolln (1980, 1999) being sympathetic to the teaching of grammar, while those such as Hartwell (1985) seem strongly against it. Writers of Academic Writing modules within Caribbean universities over the years have almost grudgingly accommodated, to a small extent, the teaching of grammar. However, the results of a recent error analysis of tertiary students’ writing suggest that the grammar issue, writing conventions in general, and the overall approach to tertiary level writing in the Caribbean need revisiting. Guided by the model proposed by James (1998), the research classifies students’ errors into 4 broad categories – grammatical, lexical, discourse and ambiguous. The research reveals that the majority of errors falls within the grammatical category (55.1%) with number marking, tense and sentence construction errors showing the highest frequencies. This is closely followed by lexical errors with 31.8%. The paper argues that these students should be considered for who they are – second language learners of English – who are likely not to have a good command of the language. Writing courses within Caribbean tertiary institutions therefore need to be tailored to achieve a better balance between the teaching of rhetoric and grammar. This paper proposes possible strategies which may be employed within “second-language learning” tertiary classrooms in the Anglophone Caribbean.

178-201

Balancing composition and grammarUTech JamaicaAcademic WritingError AnalysisCreole-influenced learners