"It Have More Soft Words" : A Study of Creole English and Reading in Carriacou Grenada

Abstract:

In 1982-84 a group of junior secondary school children in Carriacou, Grenada, who had failed to acquire critical literacy in English, were given the opportunity to read and write their own home language, an English-lexicon creole. A phonemic spelling system designed by the PI was used. Their progress was monitored and compared to a control group. They exceeded the control group in English literacy acquisition, suggesting that children's first literacy is most easily obtained in the home language using a rationally designed spelling, and that the same children are capable of transferring their knowledge of reading to a standard language, in this case English.

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