Trinidad and Tobago Sign Language

This paper is a partial replica of a study by . It first documents the earliest attestations in Bahamian of the diagnostic features of English-lexifier pidgins and creoles proposed by . Bahamian is then compared to the seven Atlantic English-lexifier varieties considered by . As shown by , this feature-based approach allows for the quantification of the affinity between Bahamian and Gullah. Finally, a number of selected diagnostic features recorded in Bahamian are discussed in terms of their origin and of their distribution.

UNIAACL-EACL Trinbago Maroon Matrix
And implications for a united Caribbean/African states

Conclusion: Haiti Kreyol/Kweyol/Patois; St vincent Grenada Barbados Bahamas and Trinidad And Gullah Geechee are one culture and empire of villages once tribal bias is removed. Note: Size of Cuba and Bahamas Haitian Descent population might push the Haitian Caribbean ratio closer to 30%/33% percent. 1 out of 3 Black Caribbean islanders may be Haitian.  Trinidad has pushed themselves into Yoruba Nigerian politics in a way that isolates the island and destabilizes the cultural and political cohesion of the entire west African region and Caribbean regions. This will become clearer due to the Sahel/Atlantic Alliance which is a 6 country federation of related ethnic groups (non Yoruba) stretching from west to east africa. Trinidad And Tobago activists have shown a lack of support and lack of ability to organize across the Caribbean in support of the sahel and Atlantic alliances due to political tribal commitments to yorubaland Nigeria.

This volume features research papers dealing with creolized and partially restructured language varieties in the wider Caribbean region. Initially conceived of as a conference volume drawing on papers presented at the 2017 Summer conference of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, organized by the Universities of Tampere and Turku, Finland, the authors have since expanded the content of their original papers substantially, contributing to the empirical and analytical depth of their submissions. The volume ultimately aims both to validate new contact language research with this regional focus, as well as to stimulate further research on the fascinating language varieties that have developed and continue to thrive in the Caribbean region.

This qualitative research paper explores the experiences and perspectives of two long-standing teachers and poetry enthusiasts who use poetry and Rapso in their classrooms. The researchers use self-study of teaching and narrative analysis to share their stories and explore the ways in which personal and localized materials inform their teaching. They employ a "critical friend" to facilitate verification of the narratives and findings. The emergent themes, while identifying challenges, portray Rapso in the Poetry and the Poetry in the Rapso as rich in relevance and opportunities for nurturing a joy for learning and teaching generally, and reading and cultural identity more specifically. "West Indian children live poetry," asserts the Caribbean Examinations Council (2011, p. 8), yet they are deficient in their appreciation and understanding of this very creative expression. Teachers are encouraged to address this inadequacy by placing the learners' knowledge, aesthetics, and individual sensitivities centre stage. In Trinidad and Tobago, the emphasis on the Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) at the primary level-and further high-stakes assessments to come-leaves poetry, as in similar contexts elsewhere, at risk of being marginalized (Hughes, 2007). Many teachers who may have used poetry in their pedagogy are inclined to yield to the pressure of time and resistance from colleagues and parents. There is a need to encourage such teachers to continue their use of poetry, while practising cultural modelling and student-centred pedagogy that incorporates popular oral literary and communicative styles. We assert that rather than continue the emphasis on Eurocentric poetry, still common in many former colonies, this love and use of poetry can also be used to explore and embrace local art forms as well as problematize local sociocultural and socioeconomic issues. Dennis A. Conrad et al. 2 Poetry to Rapso: The Context Education has for a long time been espoused as the most effective tool for the future development and progress of nation states. Given this assumption, the Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago has committed itself to ensuring that all of its citizens, regardless of their gender, class, culture, and ethnic origin, are given the opportunity to access positive learning opportunities (Trinidad and Tobago. Ministry of Education [MOE], 2008). To this end, it has invested heavily in its education system, and has ambitious plans for improving quality as it seeks to achieve developed nation status by the year 2020. However, an analysis of National Test results for 2005-2009 showed that 53% of Standard 1 and 57% of Standard 3 students performed below the standard in Language (De Lisle, Smith, & Jules, 2010). This approach to the selection of students for secondary education and that of its forerunner, the Common Entrance Examination, follow the College Exhibition model of the colonial period. De Lisle (2012) contends that despite concerns inherent with high-stakes models, high societal legitimacy, expectations, and values continue to be associated with these tests. As such, there is an overarching emphasis on test scores for secondary school entrance, which compromises reform initiatives, including more student-centred and culturally responsive pedagogy. Literacy One critical reform initiative is in the area of literacy, which is central to facilitating national, community, and personal growth. Students facing significant challenges with reading, or those who have been disaffected based on their experiences, are subsequently at a higher risk of reading underachievement in secondary schools (Stanovich, 2000). In Trinidad and Tobago, as elsewhere, this group is largely comprised of boys from low-income families (Allington, 2006; Miller, 1994). One important approach to addressing this literacy challenge has been the shift in pedagogical style from teacher as "dispenser of knowledge" to more constructivist or interactive roles. This incorporates the learners' sociocultural background, prior knowledge, skills, and abilities within a more relationally engaging classroom context that facilitates cultural modelling, student centred pedagogy, and the use of oral traditions (Accioly de Amorim, 2009; Freire, 2000). Using poetry for literacy development. Poetry offers an approach to literacy development that incorporates performance, self-reflection, culturally and socially relevant curricula, accessible resources, and

For several years, inspired by Martin Gannon's concept of using metaphors to describe cultures, students in international management at the University of the West Indies have written short papers exploring Caribbean cultural metaphors and how they relate to management. These have included: the Rum Shop, Carnival in Trinidad & Tobago, Crop Over and Pudding and Souse in Barbados, Sunday Lunch, Nine Mornings in St Vincent & the Grenadines, and the Blue Hole of Belize. There are lots more, but this gives an idea of the wide array of metaphors that can serve to help understand the West Indian/Caribbean culture. The IJCCM published a couple of metaphors in earlier volumes and we thought it might be timely to prepare a paper on Caribbean metaphor. We wrote to ask if such a paper would be of interest and got a response asking if we would be interested in doing a special issue on the Caribbean. Thus, this special issue was born. We could hardly say 'no', as we have been 'complaining' about the lack of management research on the Caribbean. We believe the papers presented in this special issue provide an interesting and insightful contribution to the literature on culture and management in the Caribbean. Nurse and Punnett (2002) noted this as one of the critical areas for research in the region. The metaphors presented here are 'No ball! Ethical management and social capital in West Indian society', 'Calypso in the Caribbean: a musical metaphor for Barbados', 'Caribbean liming: a metaphor for building social capital', 'Carry mi ackee go a Jamaican market: ackee as a metaphor for the organization and environment of Jamaican business' and 'Yoruba proverbs as cultural metaphor for understanding management in the Caribbean'. The reader will find that these metaphors provide an array of ideas for understanding the West Indian/Caribbean context better, and considering how these relate to management. It has been interesting and informative for the guest editors preparing this special issue. We are grateful to the editors of IJCCM for giving us this opportunity. In the following discussion we present some basic information on the West Indies to provide a context for understanding the metaphors which constitute this special issue. The West Indies (sometimes simply referred to as the Caribbean, although technically, the Caribbean refers to all the countries bordering the Caribbean Sea) is a collection of islands in the form of an archipelago (Lewis, 1968) spanning some 1,500 miles from the north (just southeast of Florida) to the south (just north of the tip of South America). These islands were occupied by

In Iquitos, Peru, a city of about 500,000 in the Peruvian Amazon, there is a disparity in the sign language skills of deaf individuals based on age. Large numbers of deaf adults use Peruvian Sign Language (LSP) as their primary means of communication and interact with one another at deaf association and church gatherings. In contrast, the majority of deaf youth younger than eighteen years old grow up primarily in hearing environments, without access to spoken Spanish or LSP. In order to communicate with the hearing individuals around them, many develop rudimentary manual communication systems, called homesigns. The disparity in language skills between deaf youth and deaf adults has not always been so prominent. In the past, deaf students in Iquitos gained access to LSP by attending one of four special education schools, where they could routinely interact with deaf peers and, sometimes, deaf adults. In recent years, however, deaf youth have been placed in regular education "inclusive" classrooms, where they are typically the only deaf person in the school and receive no support services to access the language of the classroom. This change in policy has had the unintended effect of cutting off the previous pathways by which deaf youth in Iquitos gained access to LSP in the classroom. Thus, the adoption of "inclusive" education as the new special education policy has resulted in large numbers of deaf youth relying on homesigns as their primary form of communication. This research is based on ethnographic fieldwork with deaf individuals in Iquitos that has been ongoing since 2010.

In this autoethnographic piece, I explore my writing events and activities that bring me to an even greater realisation that, Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose (The more things change the more they remain the same). It pushes me to tell mystory as an Afro Caribbean scholar who chooses to reside and work in the USA. I reflect on and reinterpret my writings using a dialogic/performance analysis. One major outcome is a consciousness, an awakening, and recognition that social plantation systems continue to exist in the geographic spaces-Trinidad and Tobago and the United states-that I embody. It is a painful experience, but I can transcend the isolation and use the networks available on the plantation as resources. I can find venues in which I can resist, write, speak about, and write back using cultural tools, conceptual frames, and literary devices that resonate with me as an Afro Caribbean scholar.

This paper reports on a small-scale, exploratory study into the impact of Creole dialect forms on the writing of 9-11-year-old pupils in the Commonwealth of Dominica. The grammatical features of these non-standard dialects and the frequency with which they occur in the pupils' writing (N = 55) are itemised and compared with similar studies carried out in England and St. Lucia. The investigation found that the use of non-standard dialect in writing was a comparatively rare phenomenon compared with other grammatical and orthographic features, and supported the findings of earlier studies. Pedagogic implications arising from the findings are considered together with some tentative pointers for future research.

The English-speaking Caribbean are those states that were formerly British Colonies. The institutionalization of educational research in this area has evolved over the past thirty years. The settings for research institutions have been the university, government ministry of education, and private enterprise. The research findings have been used for 14itimization of policy changes; justification of educational expenditures; ensuring qutlity; and action as a problem solving device. Most of the research has conformed to, the traditional mode of thought and has been imitative, rather than inventive. A meeting of researchers in the Caribbean was held in Barbados in 1981. As a result, the group decided on the necessity for linkages to be established between researchers across several disciplines. Biennial conferences of educational researchers rotating among countries was suggested. An agency was needed to oversee the institutionalization of educational research in the region. A proposal was made for universities of the region to discuss regional loans for research with governments. Establishment of a 'Caribbean Educational Review and Advisory Group was propos0 as the most effective means of drawing together educational researchers to dive direction, guidance, and inspiration to the development of educational research in the region. (DWH)

This case study aims to examine how Barbadian and Trinbagonian teachers experienced socio-emotional skill learning through a digital badge-driven learning process and what were teachers' perceptions on how socio-emotional skill training benefitted teaching and learning. The study's focus is on the teachers' reported professional development experiences. Participants (n=148) in this study were from pre-primary, primary, and secondary schools. The case study used a mixed-method approach, including quantitative analysis of simple frequencies and qualitative inductive content analysis based on an online questionnaire. The results indicated that the teachers participating in the programme recognise the importance of socio-emotional aspects in the teaching and learning processes. They further revealed that socio-emotional skill training has the greatest impact on teacher-student interaction, and that such skills should be integrated into daily teaching activities to support students' personal growth and learning in a school community. The study offers practical recommendations for teachers' professional development in Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago.

This paper reports on a small-scale, exploratory study into the impact of Creole dialect forms on the writing of 9-11-year-old pupils in the Commonwealth of Dominica. The grammatical features of these non-standard dialects and the frequency with which they occur in the pupils' writing (N = 55) are itemised and compared with similar studies carried out in England and St. Lucia. The investigation found that the use of non-standard dialect in writing was a comparatively rare phenomenon compared with other grammatical and orthographic features, and supported the findings of earlier studies. Pedagogic implications arising from the findings are considered together with some tentative pointers for future research.

Creole speakers have always been perceived as having less value than Formal Language speakers. "Creoles and creolized varieties of English are associated with low ethnic, social, political, and economic status" (Nero). More recently, poverty and low educationalsuccess rates have been causally tethered to Creole languages. However, there is a vocal minority of linguistic scholars and analysts who are advocating and changing attitudes towards the acceptance of Creole languages. This paper proposes that this embrace ought to be encouraged. This research aims to answer vital, existing questions in relation to the acceptance of Creole languages in education. The method of data collection will be through the mediums of Questionnaires for both teachers and students, and Interviews for the students. This interview will provide the researcher with information to make valid comparisons between the uses of Creole languages against the use of Formal English in the classroom setting.

This article deals with the problem of the early stages of creole formation. The significant structural and material similarities between the aspectual systems of the verb in Hiberno-English and in the West Indies English-based creoles are demonstrated. Suggestions are made about the possible impact of the Irish language on the formation of the English-based creoles in the early stages of creolisation. The historical evidence which proves the possibility of language contact between Irish, English and West African languages in the Caribbean in the past is provided.

A growing body of work, most of it corpus-based, looks at variable agreement with collective nouns and in existential constructions in English. However, few studies have looked at these particular features in Caribbean Englishes, and none of these have taken an acceptability approach. In this paper, results of an online survey measuring the acceptability of variable agreement in collective nouns and there + be existential constructions are reported. Additionally, the relationship between the latter forms and the Creole existential it+have is also considered. Speakers of Trinidadian English are found to hold conservative views towards variation in these contexts. For collective nouns, singular agreement is overwhelmingly preferred, and standard agreement in there + be constructions is also preferred, despite the trend in other Englishes towards the use of non-standard agreement, particularly with the there's form. Interestingly, the Creole form is judged more favourably than the non-standard there + be existential forms. 1 INTRODUCTION Writing on agreement in English, Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik (1985) proposed what they call the principle of grammatical concord. This states that, '[a] singular subject requires a singular verb [and a p]lural subject requires a plural verb' (Quirk et al., 1985: 312). There are several restrictions to this principle, as well as several instances in which concessions to this principle are made. Two of these will be explored here. Firstly, there is notional agreement, where the 'choice of verb form is determined by the meaning rather than the actual form of the subject' (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999: 187). Collective nouns, such as 'family and government' , are examples of words that are subject to notional agreement, but notional agreement is also observed with plural names of single countries even if there is coordination (compare 1 and 2) and with expressions of quantity (3) (Biber et al., 1999): (1) Trinidad and Tobago has the best Carnival celebrations. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

This second and last part of the article UNDERSTANDING OUR PAST IN THE SCHOOL EXPERIENCE describes in detail the curriculum and the general routine of instruction that the English Schools (as they were known in Costa Rica) practiced. The purpose of the study was to develop an historical portrayal of schools for Afro- Caribbean people in Costa Rica during the first half of the 1900s. The focus of the articles is based on an oral history investigation that evolves around four key questions: 1) what were the schools of the Afro-Caribbean people in Costa Rica like during the 1934-48s? 2) How were they started? 3) What curriculum was taught in those schools? How was it taught? The selected site for the study was Limon, Costa Rica. This city has been the place of arrival and dwelling of most of the country’s Afro-Caribbean people since 1872. The qualitative methods used provided evidence to answer the research questions. The interviews followed the guidelines of oral history inquiry (i.e....

is a nationally and regionally renowned department engaged in teaching and research in academic writing, linguistics, modern languages and their literatures. We seek to develop in students the ability to analyse and interrogate languages and literatures for a multiplicity of purposes while facilitating cognitive and affective student learning that may be applied nationally, regionally and internationally. Research Notes is published by the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics.

Emerging sign languages in the Caribbean 1 Most of the work on which this chapter is based was collaborative. I am indebted to the deaf and hearing people around the region who have generously shared their insights, time and hospitality. I am grateful to co-researchers,

As an institution that has, since its inception, focused primarily on teaching rather than research, The College of The Bahamas has, following other Bahamian public institutions, not traditionally produced substantial empirical studies of Bahamian society and educational practices. Accordingly, this report presents the findings of a student exit survey of the largest first-year writing course at The College of The Bahamas, a study designed to measure students' perception of learning in the course. To facilitate comparison, the survey instrument generally followed publicly available survey studies of first-year composition students at other postsecondary institutions. While the exit survey suggests that students perceive the course as a whole to be beneficial for their development as academic writers, there is some evidence that students, in their responses to the survey, over-represented their learning in the class. Based on the data, the authors make several suggestions for improving student experience and outcomes in first-year writing courses at The College of The Bahamas. These suggestions include offering students more opportunities to learn library research strategies and building connections between writing instructors at the College of The Bahamas and secondary school English teachers in the Bahamas.

One of the challenges that Caribbean immigrant parents and children face as they settle into their new environment is interacting with teachers using their variety of English. This study seeks to explore the experiences of Caribbean immigrant parents and their children in their interactions with teachers in Toronto and the perceptions that they have about these interactions. The author’s purpose is to bring voice to their language encounters. Qualitative analysis is utilized throughout the general discussion of the study. Using Colaizzi’s (1978) phenomenology approach, data was collected through semistructured interviews from a sample of six immigrant parents and seven children within Toronto. The central themes that emerge from the data are organized under the four research questions. The results of the research may assist policy makers, educators, teachers, and support staff who plan and implement programs geared towards enhancing the interaction between themselves and Caribbean i...

Since the introduction of the Education for All policy of the Government Assistance for Tuition Expenses (GATE) in Trinidad and Tobago, more tertiary level classrooms have been furnished with mixed linguistic and academic abilities and have accommodated more non-traditional tertiary-level entrants into the educational system. The expansion of the tertiary sector has also fostered lower minimum requirements for candidates entering tertiary institutions of learning (TILs), which differ from higher institutions of learning (HILs). More inclusive strategies in English composition courses are therefore needed to manage the reality of mixed abilities and greater non-standard language use among some of these learners, as part of the educational process. Therefore, the author proposes limited vernacular accommodation as a response to sectoral diversity and as a viable strategy for more inclusive education that would match the learner characteristics and the socio-educational contexts of TIL...

IN MEMORIAM DR. JOAN M. FAyER J oan M. Fayer was a professor of linguistics in the Department of English of the College of Humanities for 45 years. In addition to an M.A. in English (literature) she obtained a second M.A. and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania where she studied sociolinguistics, an emerging and ebullient field at the time, with illustrious professors like sociolinguists Shirley Brice Heath and William Labov, a household name in variationist sociolinguistics, anthropologist and ethnolinguist Dell Hymes and Gillian Sankoff, distinguished professor and her dissertation adviser, among others. Dr. Fayer was one of those few fortunate students who received the baton directly from the great masters in the field. During her academic career, she helped expand the graduate program in English by creating new courses like Sociolinguistics, Language and Culture, Special Issues in Sociolinguistics, Creole Languages, Dialectology of the English-Speaking World and Studies in Bilingualism from a Sociolinguistic Perspective. She was truly responsible for bringing this new area in linguistics to the university and to Puerto Rico. She also served as the director of the Graduate Linguistics Program in the College of Humanities and coordinated the English as a Second Language component of the English Department. In the 1980s she

This qualitative research paper explores the experiences and perspectives of two long-standing teachers and poetry enthusiasts who use poetry and Rapso in their classrooms. The researchers use self-study of teaching and narrative analysis to share their stories and explore the ways in which personal and localized materials inform their teaching. They employ a “critical friend ” to facilitate verification of the narratives and findings. The emergent themes, while identifying challenges, portray Rapso in the Poetry and the Poetry in the Rapso as rich in relevance and opportunities for nurturing a joy for learning and teaching generally, and reading and cultural identity more specifically. “West Indian children live poetry, ” asserts the Caribbean Examinations Council (2011, p. 8), yet they are deficient in their appreciation and understanding of this very creative expression. Teachers are encouraged to address this inadequacy by placing the learners ’ knowledge, aesthetics, and indivi...

The socio-historical realities of creole-speaking territories are deeply entwined producing at the same time, some distinct linguistic realities. The present study will attempt to give a broad panoply of the linguistic phenomena that have shaped the vernaculars of some of the British-ruled territories. We will focus on spelling, lexical and morphosyntactic similarities in four varieties and examine to what extent speakers of other varieties of English can access written texts without having been formally trained to read and understand related varieties.

Critical literacy can be defined as a cluster of specialized skills and competencies that facilitate an intensely engaged way of interpreting our world through careful textual and discursive analyses. It involves understanding the processes of learning to read and write as the precursor to a heightened awareness of one’s location within specific power relations, as well as its importance to ensuring a sustainable democracy. Ultimately, critical literacy is an indispensable component of the broader literacy mandate at the University of The Bahamas, as it can propel students toward greater participation in national discourse, and ultimately, toward meaningful social transformation. While this paper presents anecdotal rather than analytic evidence of students’ growth toward increased critical intelligence, it provides significant insight into the processes of their intellectual growth.

The histories of deaf people around the world have frequently been neglected. One reason for this is that the native languages of deaf people are signed, and there is no widely used system for transcribing signed languages. In many countries, deaf people have typically had little access to literacy in a spoken language as an alternative format. As a result of such factors, there are few textual historical records produced by deaf Trinbagonians, and their history has largely been overlooked. This paper focuses on the development of the education of deaf children in Trinidad and Tobago since the first school for the deaf opened in 1943.

5 Introduction 6 Concepts 10 Policy Paper 17 Advocacy Plan 35 Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Plan ........44 Communications Plan 51 Policy Brief 59 Assessments and Learning 63 References 655 BILINGUAL EDUCATION FOR YOUTH IN ST. LUCIA 5 5 Abstract This campaign portfolio argues the case for a national bilingual education policy on the island of St. Lucia, where youth speak both St Lucian Creole and St. Lucian standard English. The portfolio consists of a policy paper and brief, an advocacy plan, a communications plan, monitoring and evaluation plan. The Bilingual Education Taskforce (BET), made up of teachers, parents and principals, is an advocacy organization that discovered the need for a bilingual education intervention when they observed, assessed and analyzed the written work of struggling readers at their school, the Anse la Raye Infant School on the west coast of St. Lucia. They also analyzed the issues of youth unemployment, youth drop-out rates and low tertiary educati...

This paper is a partial replica of a study by Hackert and Huber (2007). It first documents the earliest attestations in Bahamian of the diagnostic features of English-lexifier pidgins and creoles proposed by Baker and Huber (2001). Bahamian is then compared to the seven Atlantic English-lexifier varieties considered by Baker and Huber (2001). As shown by Hackert and Huber (2007), this feature-based approach allows for the quantification of the affinity between Bahamian and Gullah. Finally, a number of selected diagnostic features recorded in Bahamian are discussed in terms of their origin and of their distribution.

Language policy decisions are made daily in the Caribbean. They may include selection of official or national languages, development and implementation of writing systems, organization of national literacy campaigns, recognition and regularization of creoles or dialects, establishment of teacher training standards, creation of scientific or technological nomenclature, dissemination of publishing norms, and preparation of dictionaries. Regrettably, many determinations involving language are made with little genuine input from those trained to analyze language and its social functions. In Puerto Rico, partisan politics and commercial concerns, rather than sociolinguistic insights, have traditionally prevailed in language-related matters. This paper probes the different types of language policies carried out routinely in Puerto Rico. It then outlines the specific contributions that linguists can make to the resolution of language issues, based upon the documented experiences of other C...

The need for comparative law in the age of globalization and internationalization of life in general, and legal development in particular, has been articulated in legal scholarship. 1 The importance of comparative law for training modern lawyers has been emphasized as well. 2 Nevertheless, these issues are still discussed mostly in relation to and in the context of larger countries and major legal systems, mostly Europe in whole, its largest countries (Germany, France, and the United Kingdom), and the United States. The importance of comparative law for small, marginal jurisdictions offers a fruitful field to explore. This Essay discusses the Author's personal experience of teaching the course of comparative law at the Faculty of Law at Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies (Barbados), focusing on the benefits and challenges of this teaching in this particular region. The discussion also includes the history and current development of comparative law in this part of the world as well as future prospects of this field of knowledge.

A growing body of work, most of it corpus-based, looks at variable agreement with collective nouns and in existential constructions in English. However, few studies have looked at these particular features in Caribbean Englishes, and none of these have taken an acceptability approach. In this paper, results of an online survey measuring the acceptability of variable agreement in collective nouns and there + be existential constructions are reported. Additionally, the relationship between the latter forms and the Creole existential it+have is also considered. Speakers of Trinidadian English are found to hold conservative views towards variation in these contexts. For collective nouns, singular agreement is overwhelmingly preferred, and standard agreement in there + be constructions is also preferred, despite the trend in other Englishes towards the use of non-standard agreement, particularly with the there's form. Interestingly, the Creole form is judged more favourably than the non-standard there + be existential forms. 1 INTRODUCTION Writing on agreement in English, Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik (1985) proposed what they call the principle of grammatical concord. This states that, '[a] singular subject requires a singular verb [and a p]lural subject requires a plural verb' (Quirk et al., 1985: 312). There are several restrictions to this principle, as well as several instances in which concessions to this principle are made. Two of these will be explored here. Firstly, there is notional agreement, where the 'choice of verb form is determined by the meaning rather than the actual form of the subject' (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999: 187). Collective nouns, such as 'family and government' , are examples of words that are subject to notional agreement, but notional agreement is also observed with plural names of single countries even if there is coordination (compare 1 and 2) and with expressions of quantity (3) (Biber et al., 1999): (1) Trinidad and Tobago has the best Carnival celebrations. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

One of the challenges that Caribbean immigrant parents and children face as they settle into their new environment is interacting with teachers using their variety of English. This study seeks to explore the experiences of Caribbean immigrant parents and their children in their interactions with teachers in Toronto and the perceptions that they have about these interactions. The author’s purpose is to bring voice to their language encounters. Qualitative analysis is utilized throughout the general discussion of the study. Using Colaizzi’s (1978) phenomenology approach, data was collected through semistructured interviews from a sample of six immigrant parents and seven children within Toronto. The central themes that emerge from the data are organized under the four research questions. The results of the research may assist policy makers, educators, teachers, and support staff who plan and implement programs geared towards enhancing the interaction between themselves and Caribbean i...

One of the challenges that Caribbean immigrant parents and children face as they settle into their new environment is interacting with teachers using their variety of English. This study seeks to explore the experiences of Caribbean immigrant parents and their children in their interactions with teachers in Toronto and the perceptions that they have about these interactions. The author’s purpose is to bring voice to their language encounters. Qualitative analysis is utilized throughout the general discussion of the study. Using Colaizzi’s (1978) phenomenology approach, data was collected through semistructured interviews from a sample of six immigrant parents and seven children within Toronto. The central themes that emerge from the data are organized under the four research questions. The results of the research may assist policy makers, educators, teachers, and support staff who plan and implement programs geared towards enhancing the interaction between themselves and Caribbean i...

The Caribbean Sexuality Research Group (CSRG) is indeed proud to have been given the opportunity of contributing to this special issue of Sexuality & Culture. The CSRG is a non-profit, non-discriminatory working group that recognises diversity in orientation, language and ethnicity throughout the region and focuses on research into sexualities in the Caribbean and its diaspora. The group is comprised of professionals from a wide variety of areas related to human sexuality. The articles in this issue of Sexuality & Culture reflect a small part of that diversity, as seven of our twenty-five members have been included in here. In their article, Cowell and Saunders explore the challenge of legal reform as it relates to the public discourse around heteronormativitiy and homosexuality. In Wine, Women and Song, Hubert Devonish examines the explicit sexual expression of Caribbean women in dance and the challenging of male dominance through these public displays. Carpenter and Walters, in A ...

IN MEMORIAM DR. JOAN M. FAyER J oan M. Fayer was a professor of linguistics in the Department of English of the College of Humanities for 45 years. In addition to an M.A. in English (literature) she obtained a second M.A. and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania where she studied sociolinguistics, an emerging and ebullient field at the time, with illustrious professors like sociolinguists Shirley Brice Heath and William Labov, a household name in variationist sociolinguistics, anthropologist and ethnolinguist Dell Hymes and Gillian Sankoff, distinguished professor and her dissertation adviser, among others. Dr. Fayer was one of those few fortunate students who received the baton directly from the great masters in the field. During her academic career, she helped expand the graduate program in English by creating new courses like Sociolinguistics, Language and Culture, Special Issues in Sociolinguistics, Creole Languages, Dialectology of the English-Speaking World and Studies in Bilingualism from a Sociolinguistic Perspective. She was truly responsible for bringing this new area in linguistics to the university and to Puerto Rico. She also served as the director of the Graduate Linguistics Program in the College of Humanities and coordinated the English as a Second Language component of the English Department. In the 1980s she

This paper reports on a small-scale, exploratory study into the impact of Creole dialect forms on the writing of 9-11-year-old pupils in the Commonwealth of Dominica. The grammatical features of these non-standard dialects and the frequency with which they occur in the pupils' writing (N = 55) are itemised and compared with similar studies carried out in England and St. Lucia. The investigation found that the use of non-standard dialect in writing was a comparatively rare phenomenon compared with other grammatical and orthographic features, and supported the findings of earlier studies. Pedagogic implications arising from the findings are considered together with some tentative pointers for future research.

Within recent times, the call for collaboration among stakeholders in education has been made with increasing frequency. In current thinking, community building and collaboration are posited as critical elements in school reform. The literature reveals various models for initiating collaboration. There is the model that describes the initiative for collaboration as undertaken by" researchers"/university personnel. A second model describes the perspective in which schools as organizations invite researchers to collaborate on a ...