This content analysis explored children's fictional storybooks and informational science books to determine their differences in high-quality text features that support oral language (OL) development. We also explored the opportunities for OL development in curricular books compared to trade books. Using systematic coding procedures, we evaluated…

Positively influence comprehension, vocabulary, syntax, and oral language development with read-aloud strategies. The author shares tips for making read-alouds successful.

This article reports on the development and preliminary implementation trials of a modular small-group intervention targeting syntax and vocabulary for children at high risk for reading comprehension difficulties in grades prekindergarten through first. The intervention, delivered by trained paraprofessionals, included 12 weeks of 20-minute…

Writing and literacy development are crucial for the academic and social success of new language learners in the primary grades. Over the last 25 years, several terms have been used to describe the talents and needs of children learning new languages in early childhood settings. The term that the author prefers, and which he uses in this article,…

This study investigates the relationship between working memory and language in young children growing up in a multilingual environment. The aim is to explore whether mechanisms of short-term storage and cognitive control hold similar relations to emerging language skills and to investigate if potential links are mediated by related cognitive…

This study examines the impact of various types of preschool care and education on the reading achievement of children, kindergarten through fifth grade, who participated in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K). The participants in this study are located throughout the United States of America. These…

The paper reports data from an on-line peer tutoring project. In the project 78, 9-12-year-old students from Scotland and Catalonia peer tutored each other in English and Spanish via a managed on-line environment. Significant gains in first language (Catalonian pupils) modern language (Scottish pupils) and attitudes towards modern languages (both…

A study of the effects of clause order and explicitness on comprehension of reversible causal relationships revealed that, for fifth graders, explicit-condition groups had a higher level of comprehension of causal relationships than did implicit-condition groups. For college students, both explicitness and clause order were significant factors in…

This paper analyzes the order in which subject, verb, and quote come in sentences in the children's stories about Babar by Jean and Laurent de Brunhoff. It suggests that different constructions have different functions that are exploited by the author for communicative purposes. The paper adds that the order in which these elements appear affects…

Examines the rhymes and linguistic tricks used by children, focusing on the rhyme, syllable structure, word boundaries, rhythm, meaning, and social uses of school children's poetry and rhymes. Examples are provided of various past and current poems and rhymes. (Contains 10 references.) (MDM)

Outlines reading activities that can be correlated with children's literature; focuses on the development of vocabulary, syntactic, and graphophonic skills. (MAI)

The point of departure of this study is the well-known hypothesis according to which structures that involve the syntax-pragmatics interface and instantiate a surface overlap between two languages are more vulnerable to crosslinguistic influence than purely syntactic domains (e.g. Muller and Hulk, 2001). In exploring the validity of this…

Forty-eight boys and girls, from ages 4 to 8 and with wide differences in intelligence, were subjects in a study which examined the role of visual perception in the oral language production of young children. Five tests were administered: one to sample visual perception, the others to measure selected skills of oral language--syntactical,…

This study related the style of writing found in literature for children and the relative level of readability of this material. Cloze tests of readability on 10 passages from five juvenile biographies of Lincoln were given in 1 week to a hemogeneously grouped upper elementary school reading class (n=28) in suburban Detroit. The mean T-unit…

Experimental investigations of children's prose comprehension with special emphasis on the development of skills necessary for reading comprehension are examined in this paper. The research is discussed under four major headings which correspond to specific comprehension skills: identifying main ideas, understanding logical structure, making…