Academic Writing Instruction for Creole-Influenced Students

Abstract

Academic Writing Instruction for Creole-Influenced Students embraces the interconnections of language use in society, language teaching in schools, and writing in higher education. In it, Vivette Milson-Whyte draws on discourse analysis of archival materials and data gathered from questionnaires and interviews with past and current writing specialists and on comparison/contrast analysis of Jamaican and US and UK teaching and scholarship in rhetoric and composition/academic writing/literacy in English to provide an in-depth survey of over six decades of instruction in written discourse offered to Creole-influenced Jamaican students – students who are influenced by Jamaica’s Creole language but who are not all Creole-speaking – on the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies. This first full-length book to examine the history of writing instruction and attitudes to it in the Creole-influenced Jamaican higher education context is grounded in current scholarship on language difference and writing. Given its highly comparative nature, its comprehensive examination of curricular practices that can be adapted in other institutions and its practical suggestions for dismantling writing myths and adopting a progressive view of writing, Academic Writing Instruction invites academics and administrators at the University of the West Indies and other universities and policymakers in education in Jamaica to reflect on how Creole-influenced students do language, what academic writing is, how it is learned, what an academic community is, and who gets admitted into it and how. Milson-Whyte’s work will also be of use to scholars and graduate students, teachers and teachers-in-training in applied linguistics, contrastive rhetoric, (English) language education, literacy, rhetoric, and composition or writing studies as well as general readers with an interest in international trends in postsecondary education or in how writing works.