Date: 21-Jul-2005
From: Isabelle Barriere <barriere cogsci.jhu.edu>
Subject: New Institute: Yeled V'Yalda Multilingual Development and Education Research
Yeled V'Yalda Multilingual Development and Education Research Institute
Directors: Isabelle Barriere, PhD & Garey V. Ellis, MD
Contact: yvymdeyeled.org
Areas:
- Cross-linguistic, bilingual and multilingual development- including, but
not limited to: Arabic, Caribbean Amerindian languages, English, English
Creole languages, French Creole languages, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian,
Myanmar (Burmese), Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Spanish
Creole languages, Slavonic languages, Ukrainian, Surinamese languages,
Tagalog, Thai, Yiddish.
- Speech, reading and writing- different writing systems and alphabets;
- Early childhood education (0-5), intervention and rehabilitation;
- Families and their communities;
- Typical, delayed and atypical physical and cognitive development;
- Assessment, diagnostic, intervention and rehabilitation;
- Link between theoretical research and implications for education,
intervention and rehabilitation.
How do children develop in different cultural and linguistic settings? What
are the universal, language-specific, cultural-specific patterns their
development exhibits? How can this development be fostered or enhanced in
cases of typical, delayed and atypical development? What are the underlying
causes of delayed and atypical development and how to best address the
child's and family's needs? How to distinguish between delayed, atypical
and cultural-specific development?
Here are some of the issues that Yeled V'Yalda Multilingual Development and
Education Research Institute is seeking to address. The heart of the
YVYMDE Research Institute is the Yeled V'Yalda Early Childhood Education
Center (http://www.yeled.org/) (2005 Outstanding Early Childhood Program
Awards granted by the New York State Education Department Office of School
Improvement and Community Services), one of the two largest Head Start
Programs in New York City. Its population totals over 2,000 children
representing an unsurpassed cross-section of languages and cultures in the US.
The top three socio-demographic risk-factors associated with American
children's learning difficulties when entering kindergarten are: 1)
mother's low level of education; 2) family at the poverty level; 3) use of
a language other than English by the mother (National Center for Education
Statistics, 1995). "The number of children who speak a language other than
English at home more than doubled from 5.1 to 10.6 million between 1998 and
2000" and will constitute 30% of the US school population by 2015 (Fix &
Passel, 2003).
YVYMDE Research Institute will pioneer the assessment, intervention and
rehabilitation tools that will meet the need of these children and their
families while answering fundamental theoretical and empirical issues about
child development.
Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition
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