This book concerns a neglected aspect of the education of bilingual children, namely, their potential desire and ability to learn to read before age 5. The basis of the study is considered in the chapter on children as early learners, which provides accounts of children being taught to read from the age of 6 months to 4 years. The next part of the…

Looks at research and practice in the area of idioms and offers suggestions for teaching them effectively. (FL)

Points out that children must master a great deal of information about form classes, written conventions, and word referent relationships in order to understand what teachers mean when they use the term "word." (FL)

A study investigated children's ability to understand the use of deictic terms in oral and written language. The three deictic categories examined were pronouns (I, you), locatives (this, here), and motion verbs (come, go). Three groups of 24 second grade students completed an oral language task, a written language task, and a picture selection…

Reflecting the work of Yetta Goodman on child language development, this paper examines Goodman's five "roots of literacy" and offers suggestions on classroom techniques for nurturing these roots. The first half of the paper explains how Goodman identified the roots of literacy and describes each of them, including (1) print awareness in…

Phonological awareness is thought to become increasingly analytic during early childhood. This study examines whether the proposed developmental sequence (syllable[right arrow]onset-rime[right arrow]phoneme) varies according to the characteristics of a child's native language. Experiment 1 compares the phonological segmentation skills of English…

The concept of scaffolding can be used as a framework to argue that a "rich interpretation" in child language is needed in the area of early literacy learning. Child language is the reading-like text language of "prereading" kindergarten children. Two threads (internal and external) of the scaffolding process have been identified. The external…

Evidence from a nine-month longitudinal study of deaf children's early attempts at learning to read provides the construct for an instructional model that stresses that even though the children may have, at the least, a meager expressive sign language vocabulary, they can be lead successfully through the holophrastic or one-word stage of reading…

Concerned with what can be done to help produce more thoughtful, critical readers, this report first presents an historical overview of theories on the origin of language, referring to B. F. Skinner, Noam Chomsky, and Jean Piaget, among others. It then discusses biological reasons for the evolution of language and the impact of verbal language on…