This paper discusses the effects of personal response on both the research and the teaching of language and literature. Two studies are presented which show how personal response affects interpretive judgment. In addition, a study of classroom responses to literature is compared to a study of language, indicating that personal motivations preface…

Although listening skills are the most utilized of the language arts skills, they are the least analyzed by research. Causes for this neglect include the fact that listening research has not adequately confronted the basic question of the nature of listening and has utilized correlational studies with ready-made definitions and formats, the…

The Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) communication skills lexicon, compiled for use in the development of elementary instruction, is a set of words used by children between kindergarten and sixth grade. Although the lexicon was originally derived from the most comprehensive and up-to-date sources available, the major studies on which the…

This document is a collection of nine papers from the 1974 conference on research in English education and reading. Included are "The Role of the National Council of Teachers of English in Educational Research" by Roy O'Donnell, "Response to Literature" by Richard Beach and Charles Cooper, "Research Paradigms for Reading…

This paper describes the value of the cloze procedure for teaching language and composition, classroom diagnosis of language difficulties, and research into the process of composition. Any aspect of language structure, including word order, form class words, connectives, inflectional endings, and function words, could be taught through use of the…

To relate the way in which children structure stories at different age levels to their performance on other tasks or to their general stage of cognitive development, a study required subjects of four age groups to participate in working memory tasks in two different paradigms and to generate stories involving a variety of characters. The structure…

Language research over the past two decades has revealed that language is not something children "acquire," but rather a system they build. A key factor in this linguistic construction is children's interaction with parents or other caregivers. The studies reveal further that children's repeated interactions with books and stories and…

Noting that a gap exists between desired and actual literacy levels in the United States, this paper argues that the issue of literacy should be addressed holistically. Proposing that the communication skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking are integrated and support each other, the paper reviews research indicating the…

A systematic review of the nine volumes of "Research in the Teaching of English" published by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) since 1967 reflects trends of relative importance in various areas of investigation. It is probably true that more research effort is directed toward the secondary level than the college level,…

This study investigated verbal behavior of five third-grade children representing three cultural groups: Afro-American, Afro-Caribbean, and white. Ten sessions involving various language arts activities were tape recorded over a five-week period; session 7 was also videotaped. Sessions 3 to 10 involved group interaction across three interaction…

Evidence from the language use of young children is used to question accepted notions of language development and instruction in the three papers in this compilation. The first paper, "Young Children Challenge the Belief That Language Needs to be Taught Sequentially," challenges the notion of sequential development in which oral language…

Three recent studies have focused upon prereading children's concepts of written language, what they think words are, and how they understand the concept of a word. These explorations of young children's early attempts to understand and produce writing have important implications for the preschool and primary classroom. R. D. Morris found that…

To address the notion that the cognitive level of young children influences their ability to recall the logical sequence found in stories, four modes of language--story generation, retelling, dictation, and writing--were collected for three weeks from 35 second grade children. Through prior testing with the Goldschmid-Bentler Concept Assessment…

A cross-cultural study of British and United States elementary school children's writing and reading, looking in particular at the comparative growth of syntactic maturity in the two countries as the key to both processes and the link between them, is described in this report. Five hundred sixteen children in 19 classrooms in the Nottingham area…

Presenting sound instructional strategies and writing theories, these proceedings of a conference held at Marymount Manhattan College address the needs of writing teachers at all educational levels. Following an introduction outlining the conference and the "New York Writes" project, the keynote address discusses the renewed interest in…