Reports on a study that analyzed the oral language skills of four-year-old children in day care centers as they described a picture and told a story from pictures in a wordless picture book. (HOD)

This bibliography is divided into three sections. The first section lists bibliographies relevant to first-language acquisition. In the second section, books pertaining to first-language acquisition and to language in the classroom situation are cited, while the third section lists two periodicals in the same areas. Entries include both American…

Intended for administrators and policymakers as well as teachers, this digest provides a rationale for an integrated language arts curriculum. The digest first defines integrating the language arts curriculum as providing natural learning situations in which reading, writing, speaking, and listening can be developed together for real purposes and…

Based on the contention that knowledge of how and where children learn to speak is essential to the development of sound bilingual educational programs, a research project was undertaken to gain insights into how children learn oral language at school. Three bilingual and 39 nonbilingual classrooms at the preschool through the sixth grade level…

A study used children's definitions to explore the culture of the classroom from the perspective of the child. Definitions for school-related terms were elicited from first graders in two classrooms of a public elementary school in the Chicago metropolitan area. After having been acclimated to the presence of the researchers, the students were…

Examines materials in the ERIC system related to children's early oral language and the transition from home language to the more formal language used in school. Offers activities for a classroom climate that is responsive to children's oral language development needs. (HTH)

Language research over the past two decades has revealed that language is not something children "acquire," but rather a system they build. A key factor in this linguistic construction is children's interaction with parents or other caregivers. The studies reveal further that children's repeated interactions with books and stories and…

A discussion of research on naturalistic second language acquisition (SLA) focuses on its relationship to the foreign language classroom context. It is argued that to attempt to relate natural SLA to classroom foreign language learning (FLL), a coherent and consistent theoretical framework is needed. The Cognitive-Interactionist Model is developed…

The papers in this collection focus on the integration of child language development research into curriculum and instruction, which was the general topic of four conferences held in conjunction with the 1979 and 1980 annual conventions of the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English. Section one, on child…

This paper examines research findings about language development and their implications for classroom teaching. It first discusses early analyses of child grammar, which led to descriptions of the telegraphic nature of the speech of very young children and to the classification of child grammar into pivot and open classes. It then points out…

Papers in this volume include the following: "Constraints on Dative Acquisition by Chinese ESL Learners" (Hua Dong Fan); "The Learnability of Locality Conditions on Quantification" (Thomas Lee); "Do Learning Environments Make a Difference? A Study on the Acquisition of the English Interrogatives by Three Types of Cantonese…

A selective view of recent major areas of research into school processes related to language outcomes supports the contention of the Bullock Report and of many educational theorists who say that there is no one best way to improve language and literacy, but that schools and school variables can and do make differences. The research that is…

The many ways in which children use language are examined in this paper, and classroom implications are outlined. The first part of the paper discusses such topics as young children's focus on meaning in language, teachers' tendency to examine language in terms of form rather than meaning, and the importance of the student/teacher interaction…

Claims that although a child-oriented classroom is organized by the teacher, the curriculum is enacted by everyone, and that dialogues in which teachers and children develop together provides the core of this enactment. (MM)

Currently, the relationship between second language acquisition (SLA) and foreign language learning (FLL) is unidirectional, with theory and hypotheses flowing from SLA to FLL, and making FLL a subset of SLA. However, this relationship is an artificial one resting on debatable or even incorrect assumptions. These include the assumptions that: (1)…