Noting that conversation between adults and young children is a well-known stimulus to language development, but that conversation is seldom fully used in the classroom, this paper argues that conversations can and should be used more. It presents a range of research findings and classroom examples to support that argument. Chapter 1 examines the…

This report contains a series of articles from Japan, New Zealand, and the U.S. dealing with child development. The articles concern: (1) a social dynamic theory of early human development and a program of research based on this theory; (2) the need for intervention and the structure of intervention for children with disabilities on the island of…

This report describes a "culturally contexted" conversation analysis approach to the study of naturally occurring speech in supervisory conferences. The supervisors and teachers were participants in a graduate program for beginning teachers, and the conference's purpose was supervisory evaluation of teachers' classroom performances. Ethnographic…

A junior team and a masters team of precision skaters in Canada were coached under two conditions. In one condition the coach used a monologue and the skaters were not permitted to ask questions or otherwise interact with the coach. In the other condition the coach interacted in a dialogue with team members. Both teams had significantly higher…

An interactive video program, "The Screening Interview," has been developed at Miami University (Ohio) to help prepare college and university students for on-campus employment interviews with corporate recruiters. Within the context of the simulated interview situation provided by the program, students function as the alter ego of either…

A study investigated the relatively greater frequency of negation in conversation than in written language. It discovered that rejections and explicit denials of previously asserted propositions, two categories of negation postulated to be speech-specific, accounted for only about 16 percent of all negatives. Use of negatives as supports, in…

Various approaches have traditionally been used to evaluate college students' writing performance. The College Outcome Measures Program (COMP), designed to assess and improve college programs, offers new ways to collect writing samples that include responses to reasoning and problem solving tasks. Thus, the effectiveness of written communication…

This study provides longitudinal observations of young children's behaviors while viewing television in their own homes, over a time when the children were actively involved in the process of language acquisition. A total of 16 children were observed for a period ranging from 6 to 8 months. At the beginning, their ages ranged from 6 and 1/2 to 29…

This newsletter issue concentrates on the topic of teaching written language skills to mildly handicapped elementary and secondary students, with emphasis on the communicative function of writing. The feature article discusses expository writing instruction, describing essential elements of the expository writing process and characteristics of…

Studies have traced a possible link between patterns of family interaction, faulty socialization, child abuse, and delinquent behavior. Counselors can respond to the needs of society to reduce violence by their access to the research on human development and in their work with families and children. Some types of discipline and parental attitudes…

This longitudinal pilot study, which extends Veneziano's (1987) work on phonetically and semantically contingent maternal response types, compared, microanalytically and globally, maternal response types and mother-child dyadic interactions of normally developing and Down syndrome children. Participants were three normally developing infants, five…

The development and use of verbal and nonverbal communication by children in the early stages of second language acquisition were investigated in a natural setting. Twenty young speakers of Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Spanish, Icelandic, and Polish, enrolled in a multilingual program and ranging in age from 7 to 12 years, served as subjects. All of…

A study was conducted at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University to determine the relationship between the use of verbal and nonverbal interaction by preservice education students and the grades assigned to them by vocational education teacher educators. The study also investigated the assignment of grades by vocational teacher…

The first of five volumes, this guide for kindergarten and first grade complements the Chicago Mastery Learning Reading Program or other reading programs, and provides an outline of skills in listening, speaking, and writing. The introductory section contains objectives, a description of the organization of the book, and a discussion of the…

The communication difficulties of foreign teaching assistants (TA) in U.S. colleges are addressed in 11 articles, with attention to the problems of the TA system as a whole in the spirit of international educational exchange. Titles and authors include the following: "'The Foreign TA Problem'" (Kathleen M. Bailey); 'Toward an Anthropology of the…