Patois and Parenting Argument - Again

[Gen]

ditto. most immigrants dung yah chat up to chree diff languages

mi know a jamaican girl that fluent in greek, obvisously she chat patwa and english as well

Sometimes, adults are the ones who limit children. It is so beneficial for children to learn more than one language. Studies show that being bilingual improves thought processes and other intellectual capacities because different parts of the brain are used to manage the languages. You can speak patois at home and the child speaks standard English everywhere else. All of my Anglo friends here in France raise their children to be French-English bilingual. One woman I know has a nine-year old who is fluent in English, French, & Spanish.

[Tropicana]

Then why have so many children in the Toronto school system struggled due to only speaking patois?

[missus_vegas]

Then why have so many children in the Toronto school system struggled due to only speaking patois?

I dont believe say dem only speak patwah. mi feel say di ppl dem just need something fi say so dem claim say di kids no speak no english.

[kia027]

Sometimes, adults are the ones who limit children. It is so beneficial for children to learn more than one language. Studies show that being bilingual improves thought processes and other intellectual capacities because different parts of the brain are used to manage the languages. You can speak patois at home and the child speaks standard English everywhere else. All of my Anglo friends here in France raise their children to be French-English bilingual. One woman I know has a nine-year old who is fluent in English, French, & Spanish.

agreed

[Tropicana]

I dont believe say dem only speak patwah. mi feel say di ppl dem just need something fi say so dem claim say di kids no speak no english.

I can attest to this for a fact. Seen and heard with my own eyes and ears MANY times right yah soh inna Toronto and it caused HUGE problems for the children. That is why the ESL/D programme was started. It was developed specifically to deal with the Jamaican children who were falling by the way side in the Toronto school system due to their lack of proficiency in and comprehension of standard English.

[kia027]

Then why have so many children in the Toronto school system struggled due to only speaking patois?

It could be the teacher not understanding the heavily accented jamaican english along with certain perceptions of the children based on their race.

Children also pick up a second language easily as well but the key is parental encouragement is necessary

[missus_vegas]

I can attest to this for a fact. Seen and heard with my own eyes and ears MANY times right yah soh inna Toronto and it caused HUGE problems for the children. That is why the ESL/D programme was started.

ok. well at ne rate learning both cant hurt. but i can understand your paranoia and why you did what you did for your son.

[Tropicana]

Wish I could find some old issues of TESL Talk. Again hard to find the old documents online but I am sharing what I can find:

This is what the JCA was doing in 1984 to address waht was a crisis. Note bolding. Why would they and the schools have needed to set up programmes if there was no issue.

Jamaicans in Toronto

By: Jean Forde

From: Polyphony Summer 1984 pp. 140-142
© 1984 Multicultural History Society of Ontario

Presently, the JCA is as busy as ever but the emphasis has changed. Difficulties of adjustment are not experienced collectively now, but on an individual basis. The easing of the immigration laws has resulted in the arrival of larger numbers of immigrants with a broad spectrum of socio-economic backgrounds. Adjustment problems to a different culture and different educational standards continue, however, to require help from the association, particularly for the one-parent families. These are headed, for the most part, by women who must be away from the home earning a living. Left unsupervised for long periods, without enough discipline and guidance, the one-parent child often becomes a community problem. The JCA is currently engaged in counselling individuals and working with young people and teachers in the schools, particularly in the Toronto and North York Boards of Education. English as a second language is now taught to Jamaicans who speak only dialect, and the Jamaican dialect is recognised for what it is-not poor English, but a dialect beloved by Jamaicans, which few non-Jamaicans can understand.

http://www.tgmag.ca/magic/mt57.html

[Tropicana]

Not sure if this will work. Click on the link for page 74 and scroll to the bottom for the section about the school system:

http://books.google.ca/books?id=ulhQR1Xp-u8C&pg=PA198&lpg=PA198&dq=TESL+Talk+caribbean&source=bl&ots=oBSAQCb-rP&sig=eWUJBih85TLXd4KBG0HF7oT2hEY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KAz7UfSYAvX84APGxoHwCg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=west%20Indians%20in%20the%20education%20system&f=false

[Tropicana]

It could be the teacher not understanding the heavily accented jamaican english along with certain perceptions of the children based on their race.

Children also pick up a second language easily as well but the key is parental encouragement is necessary

The issue was BOTH. The teachers had difficulty understanding the children and the children had difficulty understanding the teachers. It was a HUGE problem.

The parenting issues.....well that is a WHOLE other issue.

I assure the children were speaking patois not English with a Jamaican accent. The children who arrived with a mastery of standard English did not have the same issues in terms of teachers understanding them or them understanding the teachers.

[Tropicana]

ok. well at ne rate learning both cant hurt. but i can understand your paranoia and why you did what you did for your son.

After what I saw going on in the public school system....yes I had MAJOR concerns.


These problems were most severe in Toronto but Montreal also had its challenges.


In Montreal, tutoring programmes which evolved into DaCosta Hall, a special summer school for Black children, were developed to assist Black Canadian children from inner city communities, particularly LIttle Burgundy was set up. Most students were Black Canadians who had parents from Nova Scotia and they were struggling in the school system. The main issue was that they did not see the value of education. Some had watched their parents get an education only to face discrimination and end up working as maids or railway porters.

In 1968, a group of Caribbean-Canadian Black educators who were informally working with Black youth in the city got together to form an organization in order to formalize the work they were doing. These individuals were mainly Quebec certified teachers, some university students and a couple of professors from the universities. They were shocked by the drop out rate of resident Black youth in the school system and the stories that they heard from these youths about the low expectations of teachers and indifference for their development and social and economic futures manifested by guidance counsellors and the school in general.

At the time West Indian students who were arriving with a mastery of standard English were excelling in the Montreal school system. In fact, Black teachers from the Caribbean were instrumental in spearheading these initiatives:

These educators also noticed that there was a marked absence of Canadian born Blacks on the university campuses. This lead them to making the observation that, for Blacks, the route from the Caribbean to Mc Gill was shorter than the route from the local community and its schools to the university. There was no CEGEP system at that time. But clearly, there was something endemic in the school system that prevented local Blacks from completing high school.

The THE QUEBEC BOARD OF BLACK EDUCATORS (QBBE) was officially launched in 1969. Its immediate strategy was to develop three approaches to addressing and correcting the problem. Create its own remedial summer schools, work with the school boards and other local institutions, and work with the parents of the students to remove the barriers and advance the educational attainment of the Black child . Thus the DaCosta-Hall Program was launched in 1970.

WIth the influx of Jamaican immigrants during the 1970s and children arriving spoke only patois, the Board of Black Educators was founded. The programmes focus was expanded to address the needs of new arrivals.

Montreal. Large numbers of immigrants from the Caribbean were arriving in the city. The school system had little or no knowledge of the diverse cultures of the immigrant youth, and was ill equipped to deal with the problems that immigrant children brought to the schools. The situation was further exacerbated by the racist views held in some sectors of the society about Blacks and their capacities for social and intellectual development. These prejudices were later (1971) well documented in Professor Robin Winks' history of the "Blacks in Canada."

Garvin Jeffers created the Bana Summer program in 1972 and was its first Principal. In 1976 he secured a grant for an all year round remedial program for elementary level students. In the nineties Curtis George(deceased)introduced an adult literacy program with funding from the Department of Multiculturalism as part of a Triparte collaboration involving the Jamaica Association of Montreal and the Black Studies Center. This lead to the creation of the QBBE organizational literacy program and the business incubation program at the BSC.

With the emergence of French language laws in Quebec which meant that all children of immigrants had to go to French schools, more Jamaican families migrated to Ontario and fewer opted for Montreal.


Anyway, I really don't have anything else to say about this as clearly people aren't prepared to accept the facts. I am surprised that people have not heard about these issues as they were even covered in the Gleaner and discussed on the radio in Jamaica. The issues are well documented off-line for anyone who has an interest.

This book is out of print but it is sometimes available through Amazon. It documents a lot of what I am talking about. Many university libraries also have it:

West Indians in Toronto: The Sutdents and the Schools by John Roth, 1976

http://www.amazon.com/West-Indians-Toronto-students-schools/dp/B0007AOKUO

[Diplomat]

i think much of that may have been racially and socially charged as ooposed to the kids not knowing english

Not really; some immigrant kids really do not know/understand "proper" English. Actually, not only kids who migrate here, but in the section of the Toronto known as "little Jamaica", you would be horrified when you hear some of the kids speak. While I understand the pride in the vernacular, it is unfortunate that some parents still do not understand the importance of their kids learning English, the primary language of business. I had this same conversation earlier this week with someone in the school system and it is sad when teachers and classmates struggle with understanding the way some of our kids express themselves in class.

And it is not only the children. At the college level, I have had to find creative ways of explaining academic material to adults who themselves struggle with grasping the nuances of proper English and these are undergrad and graduate students.

[Tropicana]

Thank you for backing me up on this one Diplomat. Yes definitely you bring up an important point about the adults who are struggling. In fact, I came across an orientation booklet for teachers in ESL/D programmes for adults. If I find it again I will post it.

[Tropicana]

Seeit deh:

http://www.nald.ca/library/research/caribb/caribb.pdf

I didn't post it at first as we were discussing children but there are adult ESL/D classes and tutors too for the very reasons Diplomat pointed out.