Jim Cooper's Down on the Island: "Teaching English"

Puerto Rico has gone through certain language issues and it has not always been the way it is now for the majority of young adults who go to college who can talk, read and write two languages (Spanish and English). Jim Cooper and his book “Down on the Island” introduces the controversy seen in Puerto Rico back when schools were trying to teach English and students were trying to learn it.

In the seventh chapter, “Teaching English”, we can see the methods that were once used to teach English in Puerto Rico. Any Puerto Rican who reads this essay, might feel offended to some extent, as it seems to be a mockery of the way you learn English in Puerto Rico. It is for this reason that it is clear that when Jim Cooper wrote this book he was thinking in a North American audience. However, more than an insult, I believe that Cooper 's words are a constructive criticism of the way in which English is taught in Puerto Rico.

Although with the passing of the years the number of people who speak English in our island has grown, we are not far from reality of a few years ago. Yet in most schools are still teaching English in the same way as before and even we could say that it is worse in some schools. We still see that in many schools of our island "the system has the students imitating the teacher" (Cooper , 73) , and until this situation change we can not be a fully bilingual country.

This essay reminded me a little of Jamaica Kincaid. In “A Small Place” we saw the prospect of a native of the island of Antigua versus that of a foreigner. In "Down on the Island" we see the same; the only difference is that in one reading the author, Kincaid, is the native and the in the other the author, Cooper, is the foreigner. It is interesting to see the opinions of the two authors, who want to make their audience to see the reality that occurs on islands such as Antigua and Puerto Rico.