In the quest for quality in early childhood education, it is important to explore the subtleties that define socio-culturally relevant pedagogy. A qualitative, multi-case study approach was used to explore perspectives of teachers about socio-cultural influences on their teaching in kindergarten classrooms in Ghana. Four teachers from two…

Rural children are a largely understudied population in language and literacy research, despite the fact that these children often enter school with delays in their language development. Since most rural areas suffered from so-called selective rural outmigration, many parents in rural areas are lower or middle educated. The home literacy climate,…

Collaborative and reciprocal teacher-parent partnerships have been established in prior research as vital in empowering ethnic-minority children to be competent learners who value their home background, culture, and language and also learn the language used by teachers as the medium of education. Such collaborative relationships may be challenging…

As thinking adults depend upon years of practical experience, reasoning about facts and causes, and language to sustain their knowledge, beliefs and memories, and to understand one another, it seems quite absurd to suggest that a newborn infant has intersubjective mental capacities. But detailed research on how neonatal selves coordinate the…

Computational models have played a central role in the debate over language learnability. This article discusses how they have been used in different "stances", from generative views to more recently introduced explanatory frameworks based on embodiment, cognitive development and cultural evolution. By digging into the details of certain specific…

Japanese and American children participated in a free word association experiment. Results indicated that culture was influential in the formation of language. (ST)

Noting that the previous two decades have seen Lev Vygotsky's psychology become highly influential while the psychology of other theoretical giants has faded, this book provides a major intellectual biography about Vygotsky's theories and their relationship to twentieth-century Russian and Western intellectual culture. The book traces Vygotsky's…

The Executive Committee at "ZERO TO THREE" created a Task Force on Culture and Development to deepen our understanding of the role of culture in child development and to guide the organization through a self-assessment process to better understand how staff and board members address the issue of culture in their work. The task force's literature…

The concern of this book is to examine written language and its relation to what is ordinarily understood by the term oral language, the process of its acquisition, and the place of written language in the process of mental development. The eight chapters (1) examine the relation of written language to oral language and trace the phonocentric…

Examines three alternatives to the classical framework of early cognitive development: modularity-nativism, connectionism, and theory-theory. Arguments are marshaled to support the "theory-theory" view, which emphasizes a combination of innate structure and qualitative reorganization in children's thought based on input from the people and things…

This paper attempts to illustrate with concrete data that riddles serve as a didactic device to sharpen the wits of young children. The riddle is described as a verbal routine which adapts the interrogative system of a speech community to purposes of play. Riddles concerning motion or locomotion of animals, machines and toys were collected in a…

This paper addresses issues raised in developing programs and strategies to serve Hispanic students. Discussed specifically are: (1) the demographics of California and educational implications; (2) the role of culture in the school-home relationship; and (3) the significance of language for linguistic and cognitive development of language minority…

Compared gestures of Chinese and American deaf children who had not been exposed to a usable conventional language model with speech of hearing children learning Mandarin or English. Found that deaf children conveyed central elements of motion events in their communications. Deaf American and Chinese children used gestures to express motion in…

Summarizes research findings that challenge long-standing theories of infant cognition and motor development and proposes alternative theoretical models to describe skill acquisition during the first several years of life. Findings are discussed with respect to research in the area of infant speech physiology and production. (Author/CR)

This study compared the performance of 300 Chinese children on the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts-Revised (BTBC-R) with that of American children from the standardization sample of the BTBC-R. Subjects were in kindergarten, first, and second grade, and completed the test at the end of the 1996-97 school year. The focus of the comparison was to…