This year's conference theme, "Be Seen, Be Heard," reflected not only our goal of celebrating our achievements but also represented our intent of making sure everyone's voices are heard, especially during 2017's difficult political climate. The conference opened with a motivating address from Dean Laura E. Lyons, followed by an…

A rating instrument for describing nine structural characteristics of written compositions is presented and explained. (JH)

Verbs (4800) from 1200 compositions written by Nebraska students (grades 3-6) were examined using the most sophisticated grammatical analysis available to determine children's use of the English verb system and to compare their use to recent studies of the verb in adult writing. Information obtained included the following items: Children used…

This paper discusses the nature of language knowledge and the manner in which children come to acquire this knowledge. Among the topics discussed are language production and the ability to understand sentences never heard before, sentence formation, children's construction of rules, children's language creativity, language acquisition and age,…

A study of code-switching in a group of 35 Spanish-English bilingual third-graders is reported. The students' diary journal entries and writing assignments based on previous classwork are examined. Retelling of stories previously told by the teacher and the journal entries helped identify the kind of language used by students, the code-switching…