The teaching of English in the United Kingdom has undergone change during the last decade and is presently in a state of flux. Current language concerns, mainly involving students 11-18 years old, may be viewed in three ways. Students' use of language should be encouraged in the classroom through expressive talk but with teacher guidance and…

This study examined the extent of children's awareness of the semantic subtleties of the word "promise" and their comprehension of sentences following an atypical syntactic pattern using "promise" as the main verb. Subjects included children within three months of being six-and-one-half, eight-and-one-half, nine-and-one-half, and ten-and-one-half…

Language development in preschool children was studied using pairs of pictures with three types of verbal elaboration formed for each pair. After a training trial thirty children listened to one of three types of elaboration (simple sentence, compound or complex sentence, and paragraph). They were asked to name the corresponding response item.…

This paper documents the methodological study which was undertaken to discover the best way to obtain high quality tape-recorded samples of casual, spontaneous speech from children in kindergarten through Grade 3. All children interviewed were from schools in areas qualifying for compensatory education programs under Title I of the Elementary and…

This paper documents a coding system developed to facilitate the investigation of linguistic variation in Black English. The rationale for employment of such a system is given. The use of the coding system in a study of child Black English is described and the codes for 41 phonological and syntactic variables investigated in the study are…

The proposal that young children's communicative intentions stem from prelinguistic cognitive abilities is examined in detail. The most developed available formulation of this proposal, that provided by Brown (1973), is evaluated, and the evidence in support of it is found to be insufficient. Three crucial problems, which must be solved before an…

Analysis of 24 spontaneous speech samples from children at 24 and 30 months revealed a correlated progression in the form, function, and meaning of adjective modifiers used with increased language development. (Author/DEP)

Examines the relationship of phonological characteristics of children's imitative utterances to the characteristics of spontaneous utterances in early stage I. The findings indicated that, while these imitative utterances were subject to the same production constraints, they were not subject to the same selection and avoidance rules operative in…

Provides an overview of "A Language for Life," the Bullock Report, and discusses some of its more important features that have implications for American language arts teaching. (DD)

Data in this study showed significant linguistic differences between six- and seven-year-olds and a leveling-off between the seven- and eight-year-olds. (DD)

The viewpoint is advanced that induction is a determing factor in the way knowledge is acquired and that in the acquisition of a language and the development of knowledge this process plays a crucial role. (JD)

Discusses a study which sought to determine the degree to which the reading activities in one school district's elementary schools are matched to certain psycholinguistic concepts. Concludes that, until teachers become more aware of how language works and what the reading processes are, reading instruction will continue to overemphasize the visual…

Reviews the literature concerning the importance of a child's oral language in learning to read. (JM)

Notes the positive attributes and shortcommings of Halliday's model for children's language development. (RL)

Proposes that phonological development involves the three fundamental processes of perception, organization and production. Acquisition proceeds by the suppression of natural phonological processes in a systematic fashion. Processes slide through a child's system, appearing first as constraints on perception, and later on organization and…