Our context is bilingual whereby teachers and other educated speakers can have the productive capability to use either Standard English or Creole English depending on whom they are speaking to, the topic, the context, and their own language socialization. While most teachers navigate with fluency between Standard English and an English-based Creole language, many resist the idea of owning their Creole English variety in the context of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. We don’t know whether speaking about both English and Creole English in the same sentence may mean not being taken seriously by an international audience. The existing TESOL industry places non-English speakers in a client-based relationship in relation to recruiters, funders, and mainstream TESOL scholarship. So imagine being both client and consultant at the same time.

For instance, in a book project that I am working on, I started off thinking that I had to defend my English-speaking identity by professing that I am from the English-official nation of Trinidad and Tobago, on a placard. If not, flaunting my brand of bilingualism would erode the roots of my colonially-influenced education and undermine the legitimacy I would be afforded as an educator and teacher trainer in a field where a non-native speaker usually identifies with as cultural block or brand of English. This could be Asian, Hispanic, Nordic, or even racialized linguistic identities such as Indian, Chinese or, African, or Arab, which can conjure up distinctive expectations regarding speaking English.

In contrast, the Commonwealth Caribbean can be about culture, race, and ethnic lines being very blurred. Many of our ancestors of diverse races left their languages behind in the 19^th century because of a British Anglicization policies, except for vestiges of vocabulary that bind us to food, idioms, customs, religion, and family legacy. So many of our speech communities are bilingual within the related language codes of English and English Creole without clear ethnic and racial divides associated with language difference. Maybe Belize would be the exception to this rule. This makes us hard to define and in need of a culturally authentic and sensitive brand of TESOL.

I have discovered that people treat you how you treat yourself; so if we say we have a voice, we can’t honestly choose a dominant “native” Standard variety British or American, and sound like one of these, even though I am told that I sound British. In the international arena, our clients determine where Caribbean teachers may be on the spectrum, regarding accent. So we strive to sound intelligible. If that means emphasizing our r-s (rhoticity) like North Americans or stressing our diphthongs like the British, we do what is required, as both cultures have been influential in the English-speaking Caribbean. Only Barbados is considered to be a fully rhotic accent. The accents of Trinidad and Tobago, Dominica, St Lucia, and St Vincent and the Grenadines, St Kitts-Nevis and Antigua are non-rhotic, while Jamaica and Guyana are semi-rhotic (Wells, 571).

As a TESOL Community, at home, ACTION TESOL Caribbean is attempting to build our base with adhesion and authenticity. We must reach the underserved in our communities if we are to enliven an industry and a love for teaching that will stand. Our target populations are in need of sensitive English-based solutions with gloves of social justice, as our clients at home are our students with poor test scores, despite a shared colonial heritage and constitutions that are written in English. Only Grenada is explicit about English being the language of the constitution. We also serve forced migrant populations who have left their homelands because of war, economic, and political hardship.

So what we can teach the world is authenticity in our teaching practice, and in our caring. What we can do is lead the way in enlarging the reach of justice, democracy, and equality in a way that transcends language, race, culture, and social distance and meets human beings on the level of varieties within varieties, speech communities within speech communities and individual competencies regarding social dialects and repertoires. So listen out for the voice of ACTION TESOL Caribbean! We are coming to share our experiences and our pedagogies with you.

Works Cited:

Wells, John. Accents of English: Volume 3: Beyond the British Isles. Cambridge, 1982

Dr. Renée Figuera is an applied linguist, and an educator with twenty-six years’ experience in the fields of teaching foreign languages and English as a Foreign and Second Language and research in Applied Linguistics combined. She currently teaches educational linguistics, research methods, structure of the English Language and postgraduate courses in TESOL, at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine.