The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of a parent-teaching home-based program, as compared to a teacher-oriented center-based program, on children's preschool language skill development. Participants were 27 boys and 26 girls selected from 116 enrollees in a 4-county Head Start program. A pretest-posttest control group design was…

The teaching activities presented in this document have been selected from a series of language study units prepared for teachers by the Queensland Language Development Project task force as part of the Studytalk project. They focus on inquiring into some of the varieties of language most accessible to teachers and students. In each of the three…

A system for classifying English predicates into four families that account for all forms, moods, voices, and tenses is examined as an approach to teach grammar to students of English as a second language (ESL). It is suggested that by focusing on one family at a time, then building by combining these families, students can learn more readily to…

The acquisition of the metalinguistic abilities involved in ambiguity detection and resolution was studied with children. It is suggested that metalinguistic abilities may serve as potential test measures for facility in learning a second language. School children (ages 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13) were tested for their ability to detect ambiguous…

The annotated bibliography was designed to identify recommendations and best practices for instructing handicapped bilingual students. The annotations are organized according to six headings: (1) policies and legal mandates for serving exceptional bilingual students; (2) first and second language use in instruction of handicapped bilingual…

Discourse comprehension involves readers or listeners in constructing mental models using local text information, global text structures, and their general knowledge of the world. An analysis of the literature on children's understanding of spoken discourse reveals that young children are capable of forming mental models from texts, but that their…

A study was conducted to determine the effects of word imagery on the retention of sight vocabulary. It was hypothesized that in an urban, low income area first grade class there would be no significant difference between the acquisition and retention rates of high imagery words and those of low imagery words. Using one group of high imagery words…

Evaluated were the effects of therapeutic procedures (crawling, creeping, response to sensory stimulation, and patterning) carried out by neurological organization rehabilitationists on the language and social competence of nine 2-to 8-year-old neurologically handicapped children and on the children's families. (MC)

In order to investigate the development of word-formation abilities, 3-, 5-, and 7-year-olds were asked to act out with toys, judge, and make up sentences containing instances of class extension. Some sample sentences are "Can you upside-down the clown?" and "Broom the spoon." Children dealt with such sentences in much the same…

The 1975 report "Toward a Literate Society," commissioned by the United States Commissioner of Education, displays the following weaknesses among others: in making recommendations the editors ignore or contradict information contained in the individual papers; many issues relevant to literacy are omitted; and the report virtually ignores…

Although the study of the acquisition of a first language has been split by a controversy between the "innatists" and the "behaviorists," neither group has given enough consideration to the relationship between language development and the other developments of the child (social, cognitive, and perceptual). This collection of readings links the…

For Spanish-speaking children, simple stories in Spanish, told in a natural language suitable for their age, are not only entertaining, but a means of developing vocabulary and concepts. Non-Spanish-speaking children, too, need exposure to more language than they can understand word for word. However, the simple stories for the Spanish speaker…

Children's well-developed oral language skills obviously facilitate their reading and learning to read. In contrast to a traditional position which contends that reading comprehension equals oral comprehension skills plus decoding, this paper claims that a child must learn (and, perhaps, unlearn) many more skills in the transition from oral…

In this study, two different approaches to the teaching of reading were designed and presented over an eight-week period, then evaluated according to student scores on three standardized tests. After a pretest, nine first-grade classes were randomly assigned to one of three groups: literature, concept development, or control. In the literature…

A question of both theoretical and practical importance for the study of phonological development is whether there is a difference in the status of productions rendered spontaneously by the child and those repeated by the child after either an adult model or his own production. The relevant theoretical questions are: (1) Are all the child's…