Browsing by Author "Youssef, Valerie"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Guidelines for the use of non-sexist language and The University of the West Indies
    (2010-06-07T13:13:17Z) Youssef, Valerie; Carter, Beverly-Anne
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    Issues of language and literacy revisited
    (School of Education, UWI, St. Augustine, 2008) Youssef, Valerie; Drayton, Kathy-Ann
    This paper reviews the present state of academic and medical knowledge on the problems that children encounter in acquiring both language and literacy, and concludes that we need to face the issues on other fronts than those we are engaging at the present. On the one hand, there are issues of acquiring literacy in the vernacular before transferring those skills to the Standard as the second variety. On the other, there is a source of the problems that we have not begun to engage-the need for full Speech-Language screening of children on school entry so that conditions which are likely to result in potential deficits in both language and literacy can be identified and intervention measures implemented to ensure that these deficits are largely overcome. Now that we are training persons who can support our few Speech-Language pathologists in the screening, process, it is time for us to take on board seriously the 12-20 percent of children we are losing every year through failure that is not of our making
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    Language, Education and Representation: Towards Sustainable Development for Haiti
    (2010-05-04T18:00:11Z) Youssef, Valerie
    As Haiti labours under the extreme stress of possibly its greatest natural disaster to date and as vast sums of money seek to enter its vacuous system and to bring relief, it behoves us to consider the many aspects of the Haitian situation which have kept it in abject poverty down to the present and to seek means of redressing, not just the immediate crisis, but its long term internal socio-political dilemma. We all recognize the power of education in enabling a people to rise up, to become empowered, to take control of its own destiny, and yet Haiti remains with an education system which effectively excludes 75% of its people, despite ‘on paper’ efforts to address the problem.
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    OP77 - Tobago Language Project
    (2010-07-14T18:30:18Z) Youssef, Valerie; James, Winford; Solomon, Dennis; Tobago Language Project
    The Tobago Language Project has been in progress for over two years. Its aim is to document the linguistic history of Tobago. The names and bio-data of the persons interviewed are available.
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    The development of linguistic skills in some Trinidadian children: An interactive approach to verb phrase development
    (1990) Youssef, Valerie;
    This study assesses the early development of the Verb Phrase (VP) in the speech of three children growing up in the linguistic setting of Trinidad, with differential exposure to Standard English (SE) and Trinidad Creole (TC). Samples of speech were collected, starting as near as possible to the onset of morpho-syntactic marking on the verb, at ages 2;0, 2;3, and 2;4, and continuing up until 3;9, 4;1, and 4;9 respectively. It was found that the children's usage of the varieties in contact reflected closely their differential exposure, and that style shifting, which involved morpho-syntactic variation between TC and SE forms, developed for two of the three children before age 3;0. A similar order of development of conceptual categories, largely confirmatory of that for other studies of tense-aspect-modality, was noted, although there were minor differences in their surface realizations, which largely reflected input phenomena