In recent decades, a growing number of children have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a condition characterized by social interaction deficits and language impairment. Yet the precise nature of the disorder's impact on language development is not well understood, in part because of the language variability among children across…

Describing what children at the preoperational stage know about writing, spelling, and words, the authors make specific recommendations for ways language arts teachers can build instruction that is based on this knowledge. (SK)

Many researchers now believe that the representations and processes underlying syntactical development are specific to a "language faculty." If so, reference animacy would not be expected to influence acquisition of linguistic structures such as the passive sentence construction. Specifically, children should be comparably able to…

Discusses story grammar and story schema. Demonstrates how two schema-based strategies--semantic webbing and the Directed Reading-Thinking Activity--can aid in improving comprehension. (FL)

A variety of informal language development assessment tools is presented for use with children with developmental disabilities. This book is written as a manual for clinicians and researchers for evaluating children who cannot meet the cognitive, perceptual, or motor requirements of standardized tests and to help evaluate aspects of language not…

Argues that early childhood experiences with processes as diverse as language, mathematics, emotion, and music determine which neurons grow and remain active in the brain. Early exposure to these processes results in receptive programming. Discusses the implications for schools, teachers, and parents. (MJP)

The product of a two-year study investigating the literacy behavior of nine kindergarten students and their classmates, this report first explains the impetus and the theoretical foundations for the investigation and describes its subjects and setting. It then presents the methodology and the data collected from several related studies: (1)…

A group of elementary teachers enrolled in a graduate class in language arts at the University of North Dakota explored how children construct their own meanings as they interact with texts. One teacher regularly read to her 20-month-old grandson, and excerpts from the journal she kept reveal that his understanding of a specific text evolved to…

This nontechnical guide for parents and teachers examines learning to read from infants' babbling to the fluent reading of children reading independently for pleasure. Chapter 1, "Baby Speaks," describes language development in infancy. Chapter 2, "Our Alphabet: Language by Ear and by Eye," presents the alphabetic system and…

These two journals on multilingualism and multiculturalism include the following articles: "Japanese-English Conversational Codeswitching in Balanced and Limited-Proficiency Bilinguals" (Sandra Fotos); "Teaching Reading to a Developing Bilingual Baby: A Case Study in Three Stages" (Laurel Kamada); "A Japanese-English…

The four 1996 issues of the journal, written entirely in Spanish and intended for reading teachers, include articles on these topics: design of the school and classroom environment for reading; a university experiment in cooperative learning and learning strategies; use of portfolios for evaluation of student work; evaluation of reading…