Lise Winer

Like many people who become teachers, I grew up surrounded by educators. My mother helped found the first nursery school in my area, and my father taught at university. Hardly a day went by when we children were not urged to look something up in the dictionary. When my father took my brother and me to his office, our favourite play activity was “let’s teach the graduate students”, complete with chalkboard and pointer.

It was assumed that I would attend university and have a professional, if not academic, career, but schools turned out to be very difficult for me. By the time I graduated from secondary school in 1967, I had attended seven; all occasioned problems, including two suspensions for “talking back”. I had a few good teachers, and some truly terrible ones. Still, I did not think that school had to be such a bad experience. I have, in one way or another, spent my life trying to improve school experiences for students and teachers.

My pathway to becoming a professional educator was not straightforward. I gained academic degrees and work experience in several different areas. When I finally “fell into” the area of second language education, it was, as for so many in this profession, almost accidental. As a research assistant for Dr. Robert Carroll, now professor emeritus at McGill University, in the Dept. of Biology and Redpath Museum, one of my responsibilities was grading undergraduate exam papers. It soon became clear to me that many of the students suffered from not being able to express themselves well in English – they might know the subject matter, but it came out as “word salad”. I earned a Certificate in Teaching English as a Second Language at Concordia University, and taught ESL to students at English- and French-language institutions in Montreal.

My interest in the English Caribbean developed when I began tutoring students through the Jamaican Association of Montreal. These children were clearly intelligent, motivated, and highly frustrated. A lack of understanding of the nature of the relationship between their English Creole language and standard English, in addition to pervasive racial prejudice, led to an overwhelming majority of Caribbean-background students being assigned to and ignored in “handicapped” classes, as teachers ascribed persistent problems to lack of innate ability rather than to a complex linguistic and social collision. I was also fascinated by the speech of the Trinidadians and Tobagonians I began to meet. It was English, but a very different English, and I responded to it with great appreciation and curiosity; as Trinis say, “my blood took it”.

In the mid-1970s, I decided to do a doctoral degree in linguistics, focusing on the education of students whose first language was Caribbean English/Creole. A professor at the University of Toronto, one of the two professors in Canada then familiar with creole languages, told me that “women do not belong in graduate school”. I eventually got my Ph.D. at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad & Tobago campus. This decision was discouraged by many here who thought that a degree from a “Third World country” would have no value in the developed world. Doing this degree was difficult but immensely rewarding. My dissertation was on the influence of English Creole on the written English of Trinidad & Tobago secondary school students. Over the following years, I worked as a teacher of English as a second language, and gave numerous workshops for teachers in schools, especially in the Toronto and New York metropolitan areas. I then became a university level educator of students and student teachers.

Even during the early period of my work, I developed two interrelated areas of interest that can be broadly termed “sociolinguistics” – the social context of language use – and “second language education”, including the process of my own learning of English Creole. These areas are both included in the selected list of publications on this website.