This review article starts with an overview of changing education paradigms and the literature on cognitive and linguistic relationships in imaginative play related to comprehension of oral and written texts. Strategies for developing the cognitive and linguistic foundations for text comprehension through play are described. A review of current…

Growing evidence suggests that, as a group, many internationally adopted children catch up to their peers in terms of their language development by the time they reach their school-age years. Although this appears to be particularly true for children adopted during the first few years of life, it is not true for all internationally adopted…

Differences and similarities between oral and written communication as applied to writing instruction are discussed with examples of divergent oral and written styles among speakers of nonstandard dialects, code switching between speech and writing, convergence and divergence in the development of writing skills, and the role of talking in writing…

This article reviews the literature on spelling development in alphabetic scripts. It describes how once children begin to learn that the function of alphabetic writing is to represent the sounds of language, they go through the process of learning sound-spelling correspondence in increasingly fine detail, from syllables to phonemes. (Contains…

Theories of writing development put forth by C. Bereiter (1980), B. Kroll (1981), and K. Perera (1984) are reviewed and presented as frameworks for practitioners working with students having language learning disabilities (LLD). The theories are considered with regard to the assessment of written language, and written language intervention…

This article discusses similarities and differences between learning to read and spell words. While the processes are closely related and correlations between reading and spelling are high, the amount of information to be drawn from memory is greater for spellers who must produce multiple letters correctly sequenced than for readers. (Contains…

This article discusses how the processing, form, and content requirements of written language pose challenges to professionals trying to design and implement regular or remedial educational programs. Differences between oral and written language; influences of culture, value systems, and world knowledge; and structure and content interactions are…

Teaching organizational strategies to language-disordered children can improve comprehension and formulation of written language. The semantic organizer approach involves activating and organizing prior knowledge, understanding text structure, and developing organizational strategies with both a verbal component and a graphic-structure component.…