ABSTRACT
In his address to the annual conference of the National Anti-Racist Movement in Education, in April 1988, the St Lucian-born linguist Morgan Dalphinis described his own early classroom experiences on arriving in an English school. Very early on, one of Morgan's English teachers asked the class to write a composition based on some aspect of their personal experience. Morgan's response was to write a story which included everyday scenes of his life in St Lucia: for example, ‘a man fell off the [banana] truck and his head was bleeding’. Morgan's teacher, resisting the temptation to alter the non-standard ‘his head was bleeding’, chose instead to pick Morgan up on the actual content of his writing: ‘Did this,’ she asked (in a tone that said ‘This is very unconvincing, Morgan’), ‘really happen?’
