Learning the sounds of Standard Jamaican English: Variationist, phonological and pedagogical perspectives on 7-year-old children's classroom speech

This dissertation is a phonological study of the learning of Standard Jamaican English (SJE) by seven-year-old children in Grade 2 classrooms of three rural schools. Quantitative, variationist perspectives and usage-based approaches to sound representation are employed to analyze the children's (and their teachers') oral performance of SJE. Most children in Jamaica acquire Jamaican Creole (JC) at home and learn SJE in school as a second language variety. Given that teachers utilize what I term a 'modelling-replication framework' in Phonics lessons, i.e. one component of the Language Arts curriculum, I have concentrated on the classroom inputs that children have at their disposal to learn the target variety. Grade 2 teachers use certain sound patterns to mark SJE and/or Classroom speech, with a view to stimulating the children's awareness of the relationship between these patterns and the context of usage to which they appropriately belong, i.e. according to style. The classroom discourse is comprised of contextually - and pedagogically - driven speech patterns that are not necessarily observed among adult Jamaican speakers. The phonological and phonetic study focuses on word-final (-t, -d) consonant clusters and word-final vowel duration alongside classroom's stress assignment, i.e. patterns of pitch and loudness.;The children's oral participation in the classroom is based on imitative, non-spontaneous strategies whereby the interaction involves the repetition of the phonetic shape of word-forms by automatisation and absorption. Some sound patterns, though, are not available from the oral drill exercise and are only passively modelled by the teachers. The children's internalisation process in this case is not as focused as for the orally drilled items. Some speech patterns are not drilled at all. Such research provides a basis for understanding the learning processes and development of the SJE sound system at the local level as well as assisting teachers in pinpointing the forms of spoken features that their pupils produce in response to their own.;The thesis further examines the rapport between quantity and quality of input and exposure, and its implications for SJE learning and performance. I demonstrate that linguistic factors such as the phonetic environment, and usage-based factors such as lexical frequency, also significantly constrain the learning process. An important finding is that children are exposed to as well as integrate some level of phonetic and statistical detail in their growing (mental) sound repertoire. The teachers' variable usage of modelled forms in class generates the children's likelihood of developing a protean target variety. Variability reflects a fine stylistic stratification, according to appropriateness and amount of attention paid to the patterns taught by target and frequency, and performed in different tasks environments. Socio-stylistic and socio-cultural development is argued to be part of language learning. The required performance of the children in this educational environment transcends the reproduction of linguistic forms modelled by their teachers. Both the manipulation and subsequent acquisition of those forms involve linguistic, and to some degree social, awareness from each member of the class. Based on the history of Jamaica, several social, multicultural and historical elements have come to mould the language profile of the Jamaican classroom. The motives for language choice and conflict between SJE and JC in the classroom thus are deeply grounded in the Jamaican social structure.