Argues that primary grade level teachers must provide activities which promote thinking skills before expecting achievement in map, globe, and graphing skills. Provides examples of activities which may be used to promote the basic thinking skills which underlie all school work. (JDH)

To assess the relative strengths of mothers' education, parenting styles, and children's preschool experience in predicting children's verbal attainment scores, this study used data derived from a cohort of 5,362 children born in March, l946. Although preschool experience was an independent and significant predictor of verbal attainment scores,…

Reports on data collected in nine age ranges from 18 months to 71 months that examined children's ability to understand emotion-descriptive adjectives when used by adults and their own use of these words in productive vocabulary. (HOD)

Describes some of the current views in semantics and semantic development and discusses the implications for vocabulary instruction. Explains the major theories of word meaning acquisition in children and lists researched variables of word meaning development. Offers examples of instructional strategies for effective vocabulary development. (ML)

Describes two programs that involved teachers using closed-captioned television materials to develop skills in the areas of reading comprehension, vocabulary, and oral reading fluency with hearing, remedial readers. (FL)

A typology of classroom exercises according to the functions they serve in teaching textual and discourse competence and focusing more on the text than on the sentence is proposed. (MSE)

Describes the Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy, a strategy that differs from traditional instruction through its use of student generated word lists and its emphasis on students' personal experience and world knowledge. (HOD)

Discusses the use of analogy strategies, which involve comparing word parts to other known words, to teach reading. Reports on a study that showed positive effects from teaching analogy strategies to second-grade students and to learning disabled fifth-grade students. (FL)

Examines whether eighth grade students acquired measurable knowledge about unfamiliar words while reading natural text. Suggests that incidental learning from context accounts for a substantial proportion of the vocabulary growth that occurs during the school years. (HOD)

Offers teaching techniques and strategies for assisting remedial readers with word meanings and categorizing, junior high school students with vocabulary development, and middle grade students with letter writing. (HOD)

This article systematically reviews research on elementary reading programs for English language learners and other language minority students. It focuses on studies that compared experimental and control groups on quantitative reading measures. Among beginning reading models, research supported structured, phonetic programs emphasizing language…

GED (General Educational Development) learners are a diverse group--just like ABE (Adult Basic Education) and ESL (English as a second language) learners. For some, passing the GED tests closes the door on a history of defeat and failure and allows them to move ahead personally. Achieving the goal of passing all five GED tests is not easy for some…

This inservice professional development module, part of the Alabama Reading Initiative, presents research summaries, notes for presenters, and activities. The Oral Language and Vocabulary module elaborates on a student's comprehension of text as it relates to the overlap between the student's system of language and the author's system of language.…

One important but undervalued aspect of productive vocabulary is collocation--the ways in which words are combined with one another. To move from receptive to productive vocabulary, students need to learn a wide variety of ways that words collocate with each other. This paper describes the major types of collocations, typical collocational errors…

For children with poor vocabulary development, reading is intimidating rather than exciting. That is why elementary and middle school teachers need this activity-filled guidebook--to improve students' independent word learning skills and strengthen their comprehension so they will tackle their schoolwork with confidence. Teachers will start by…