Towards endonormative standards of English in the Caribbean: a study of students' beliefs and school curricula

Like other former British colonies, Anglophone Caribbean countries like Trinidad & Tobago (T&T) and Jamaica are in a process of reorientation from Standard British English towards endonormative standards. This paper investigates the present stage in this process on the basis of a survey of students' beliefs about standard varieties of English. These were found to be rather mixed, indicating that the belief in an exonormative standard still lingers on while awareness of endonormative standards is gaining ground. School curricula are also examined. Primary school curricula in both T&T and Jamaica are found to include various aspects that, if fully implemented, should help raise awareness of the local nature and relevance of Standard English at an age-appropriate level. Jamaican curricula also explicitly recognise a national standard variety as the target, which is not the case in T&T's curricula, one reason probably being that the Jamaican standard has more linguistic research to support it. The regional advanced secondary curriculum covers major aspects of the language situation in the Anglophone Caribbean but national and regional aspects of Standard English could be addressed more explicitly.