As part of a study that sought ways to improve the language arts educational experience for Grenadian children, an anthropologist investigated how Carriacou Creole English (CCE) reading materials could be provided and how these children would react to them. CCE is the native language of the inhabitants of Carriacou, a sister island of Grenada. The…

A review of the research stresses the importance of language skills to beginning reading. (JH)

This study investigated the effect on the reading comprehension of preschool children of matching syntactic patterns in written materials to patterns in their level of language acquisition. It also examined whether a language experience method or a prescribed vocabulary method had different effects on the results. Eighty randomly selected subjects…

Discusses the relationship of cognitive development or thinking skills to language development and beginning reading. (MKM)

Describes a reading program for disadvantaged students that utilizes the child's background and experiences and language in beginning reading instruction. (TO)

Argues that the language experience approach to the teaching of beginning reading not only makes use of the valuable resource of children's speaking, but also cultivates their metalinguistic ability and eases their transition between two very different forms of language. (FL)

Suggests a variation on the language experience approach designed for groups of nonverbal children. (MKM)

The primary focus of this paper is on black children and the relationship between their productive and receptive language competencies. The solutions which have been proposed to solve the dilemma of black pupils' poor reading achievement are discussed. It is noted that none of the proposed solutions has the unqualified support provided by a mass…

Goodman's hypothesis, that the task of learning to read is made more difficult as the divergence between the dialect of the learner and that of the material increases, raises three questions considered by the author to be central to the dialect/reading issue. The first asks what influence dialect has on acquiring reading ability; the second asks…

Discusses the language experience approach (LEA) to teaching reading and offers suggestions for six types of LEA stories: student selected, class shared, shape, patterned, written dialogue, and directed language teaching. (FL)

Discusses the need for systematic exploration of claims about the advantages of language experience dictations; recommends that teachers guide the rereading and editing of early dictations to facilitate comprehending behaviors, and that they help children explore writing conventions as their dictations indicate a readiness to learn them. (ET)

Describes language experience activities which tie concepts, vocabulary, sentence structure, and beginning reading skills together and which are appropriate for the bilingual child. (MKM)

The language experience approach is a reading methodoloy that is highly organized, highly structured, and very systematic, but that allows teachers to teach without texts. It is a multiple, variegated set of activities designed to serve one purpose, namely, the instructional use of pupil's own language. As such, there are five interrelated aspects…

The child approaching reading for the first time comes well-equipped with developmental tools to lighten the task. Linguistically speaking, in addition to some decoding skills, the child has a full-blown syntactic system consisting of the basic syntactic forms, though some of the more intricate forms will not be mastered until much later.…