The key ideas developed by the Writing across the Curriculum Project begun at the University of London in 1965 center on the ways in which discourse is acquired by children in a psycholinguistic sense. Among those ideas are (1) knowledge is socially determined through the interweaving of individual consciousnesses, each of which is busy construing…

This study investigates the longitudinal effects of preschool experience, Parent Education Follow Through (PEFTP) experience, and sex on academic achievement. A total of 293 children forming three cohorts from schools in two communities were included. Cohort 1 comprised grade 3 to 5 children; Cohort 2 comprised grade 1 to 4 children; and Cohort 3…

This guide provides an evaluation system by which a teacher or parent can follow a child's progress in sentence structure, usage, punctuation, capitalization, penmanship, and composition from kindergarten through grade eight. Each page lists an objective that is coded so that it is possible to correlate related materials, such as test items,…

Sound play is important to child language development in that it contributes to the phonetic substrate, it is a factor in phonological development, and it is something to be learned as part of the socially acceptable use of language. Sound play progresses in three stages: (1) babbling, in which a gradual acquisition of phonetic units is built up…

This study investigated the role of gesture in communication development. Gestural categories, based on communicative function, were identified from longitudinal videotapes of one mother-child pair. The videotapes were made weekly or bi-weekly from the time the child was 13 months of age until she was 42 months of age. The results of the study…

This paper describes a child-centered first grade classroom where learning to read is viewed as a natural step in the language acquisition process. Discussed in detail are methods of individualizing instruction for four particular children, the use of basal readers, daily writing activities using the Language Experience Approach, and both group…

A study was conducted to analyze the language behavior of mothers of children with normal language development and mothers of children with delayed language development as they interacted with their children to determine if the two groups of mothers provided different linguistic inputs for their children. Two randomly selected groups of children…

Four problems in children's paired-associate memory were addressed: (1) reappraisal of the presumed developmental trend in presentation mode effect during grade-school years, (2) identification of the locus of this developmental effect, (3) evaluation of the influence of combined presentation (verbal plus pictorial) relative to pictorial…

An approach to foreign language instruction that emphasizes language acquisition rather than learning will emphasize the development of listening comprehension even at the expense of oral production, since research has shown that the latter does not suffer where the former is fostered. This approach tends to reduce the restrictive workings of the…

The annotated bibliography of references and resources is designed to assist parents in teaching specific skills to their handicapped children, to provide parent teachers resources from which to choose materials, and to give professionals an idea of the kinds of research that has been conducted with parents as trainers of their handicapped…

This volume on second language learning contains the following eleven articles: "The Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis," by Ronald Wardhaugh, "Students' Errors and the Learning of French as a Second Language," by Magdelhayne F. Buteau, "Error Analysis and Second Language Strategies," by Jack C. Richards, "Induced Errors," by Nancy Stenson, "Global…

This pilot study trained parents in behavior modification techniques and attempted to evaluate the impact of this training on the rate of cognitive, linguistic and social development in infants. A second goal was to identify significant areas in infant development which might be influenced by the teaching strategies used. Subjects were four…

This study investigated preschool children's understanding of the words "know" and "guess." Subjects for the study were 48 male and female preschool children ranging in age from 3.6 to 6.6 years. The children were divided into three age groups representing one year intervals. The task for the study involved a "guessing" game in which a colored…

This study examines the use of personal pronouns by 6-year-old children. It was hypothesized that the child's use of personal pronouns would reflect an emphasis and awareness of the social self as actor and that the self as subject would be less salient. Subjects were 128 first or only children and their mothers. Five-minute conversations between…

Maintaining that sentence-combining language experience is the single most beneficial tool currently available to improve student writing, this paper speculates about the value and effects of the adoption of the language experience approach across the English curriculum. It presents six tasks that need to be undertaken by teachers, researchers,…