Academic Writing Instruction for Creole-Influenced Students

Drawing on discourse analysis of archival materials and data gathered from questionnaires and interviews with past and current writing specialists and on comparison/contrast analysis of Jamaican and US and UK teaching and scholarship in rhetoric and composition/academic writing/literacy in English, and embracing the interconnections of language use in society, language teaching in schools, and writing in higher education, Milson-Whyte provides an in-depth survey of over six decades of instruction in written discourse offered to Creole-influenced Jamaican students – students who are influenced by Jamaica’s Creole language but who are not all Creole-speaking – on the Mona Campus of The University of the West Indies (UWI). Given its highly comparative nature, its comprehensive examination of curricular practices that can be adapted in other institutions and its practical suggestions for dismantling writing myths and adopting a progressive view of writing, the book invites academics and administrators at UWI and in other universities and policy-makers in education in Jamaica to reflect on how Creole-influenced students do language, what academic writing is, how it is learned, what an academic community is, and who gets admitted into it and how. This first full-length book plumbing the history of writing instruction and attitudes to it in the Creole-influenced Jamaican higher education context, and grounded in current scholarship on language difference and writing, will also inform a) scholars and graduate students and teachers and teachers-in-training in applied linguistics, contrastive rhetoric, (English) language education, literacy, rhetoric and composition or writing studies and b) general readers with interest in international trends in postsecondary education or with concerns about university students’ writing or how writing works.