Langauge Education in the Caribbean: Selected Articles by Dennis Craig

Dennis Roy Craig (1929 - 2004) was one of the most outstanding Caribbean linguists of the 20th century. The Society of Caribbean Linguistics honoured him in 2000 for what was described as an academic career at once awesome and inspiring, for his devotion to Creole linguistics and his tremendous contribution to language education in the Caribbean. He was not only an outstanding figure in educational leadership in the region, which includes his service as Vice Chancellor of the University of Guyana (1991-1995), he was also a poet. In 1998 he won the Guyana Prize for Literature for the Best First Book of Poetry. However, it is with his contribution as a linguist, particularly to language education in the Commonwealth Caribbean with which this book is concerned, and to that end, eight of his most representative articles have been chosen to demonstrate Dennis’s understanding of the language situation in the English-official Caribbean and the breadth of his vision in relation to the spheres of language teaching and language learning in the English-based Creole-speaking societies. Although most of these articles were written between the 1970s and the 1990s, the problems and issues that they treat are what we continue to face in the 21st century. This is testimony to Dennis’s amazing grasp of the nature of the factors involved in the teaching and learning of language in Creole-speaking communities. This book should prove very useful not only to language teachers, but also to creolists as well as to practitioners and researchers in the field of Caribbean language education.