Low aptitude for literacy often goes hand in hand with low aptitude for language.
This week, Against the Odds looks at the third hurdle adults face in the Alta classroom: Spoken word and written word.
In the Caribbean, difficulty acquiring language is compounded because we have two forms of English–Standard and Creole.
The difference everyone notices is in pronunciation.
This only occasionally leads to misinterpretation, as in the newspaper story that mentioned square pegs in wrong holes.
In implementing my dyslexia training in the Alta classroom, I realised that phonics had to change to match my students' speech rather than the other way around.
For adults to forge a meaningful link between letters and sounds, the sounds have to be those they use. Alta Students choose between Creole and Standard English pronunciation for the 'th' phonics card and, because Trinis say the words peer, pear, pare, pair exactly the same, at Alta these four, three-letter endings have the same sound.
The difference in grammar is much harder to address.
Most of our ancestors arrived in the Caribbean, many unwillingly, and were faced with extreme language immersion with no instruction.
They picked up the vocabulary, but ignored features not essential for communication and continued to apply the only grammar they knew–that of their native language.
The shared vocabulary makes it easier to communicate, but has the big drawback of making it very difficult to distinguish Creole from Standard.
The common perception that Creole English has no past tense shows this clearly.
The form of the verb which Creole uses to show the past is that used in Standard English to denote present tense, eg "They play mas" is past in Creole, present in Standard. For present, Creole would say, "They does play mas."
Alta has a well-established language policy shaped heavily by lectures given at Alta tutor meetings in the early 1990s by Dr Lawrence Carrington and Merle Hodge.
Alta recognises that Creole English has a different grammar to Standard English and accepts the language students come with.
We replace the terms "good English" and "bad English", or correct and incorrect English, with Standard English and Creole English.
When students begin to write for themselves, according to their goals and needs, Alta teaches the differences between Creole and Standard English, one by one in a structured way.
Because literacy is a skill, you can choose any content as the vehicle to teach reading and writing. The Alta Programme uses material adults would come across in daily living in T&T, simplified to their reading level.
Alta has chosen life skills as the content for instruction–students learn to read and they learn to manage their lives and even transform these.
After more than 20 years working in adult literacy, I still marvel that students and teachers actually surmount the huge obstacles so Alta students do read, do write, do look up and out at the world where before they looked down at the ground at their feet.
�2 Against the Odds by Paula Lucie-Smith was first published in 20 Years of Alta magazine, 2012
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�2 Call 624-ALTA (2582) or e-mail altatt@yahoo.com or find us on Facebook: Alta Trinidad.