The use of second language students' existing understanding of grammatical forms in their native language for second language instruction is examined, and the importance of knowing when to replace grammatical analysis with use of the target language is discussed. A slow process of discovering appropriate teaching techniques is foreseen. (MSE)

In order to facilitate simultaneous use of verbal and gestural communication, a five-year-old Down's syndrome child was taught with the Promoting Aphasics' Communicative Effectivenes (PACE) technique. PACE provided a structured format to stimulate natural face to face conversation while providing for the use of multimodality communication. (SEW)

Describes a novel approach to teaching verbal communication principles to hearing-impaired students: students invent languages and attempt to use them in small groups. The assignment reveals important characteristics, functions, and limitations of language. (This approach was originally developed by Nels Juleus for nonhandicapped students. For his…

Discusses the language experience approach (LEA) to teaching reading and offers suggestions for six types of LEA stories: student selected, class shared, shape, patterned, written dialogue, and directed language teaching. (FL)

Describes a study designed to test if, when children describe actions, they consider the role an entity plays in an action, independent of the animateness of the entity. Results indicate that young children have relational intentions which are independent of animateness. (EKN)

Examines children's acquisition of language meaning through their use of homophony, riddles, and other word play. Discusses ways to encourage the study of meaning, using classroom techniques such as finding metaphorical relations among words and phrases, learning word origins, or studying naming strategies of other cultures. (HTH)

Investigates the ways in which primary school-aged children engage a teacher's attention through active solicitation. Argues that examining these interactions reveals both what the children do and allows for a redefinition of a conceptualization of "talk engagement." (FL)

Showed that in a task requiring judgments about the concept of "more" based on the relative numerosity of sets, three- to four-year-old children may base their judgments on such parameters as the extent to which the sets are homogeneous with respect to the color of their components. (Author/DB)

An examination of studies concerning the functional organization of languages in the bilingual brain discusses several variables. Factors that may contribute to the organization of language include age, language proficiency, literacy, reading skills, type of script, language specific factors, social acculturation, teaching method, and style. (CJ)

Three media used in a longitudinal, cross-sectional investigation to determine the rate of artistic development in young children were clay modeling, drawing, and storytelling. The most significant result of the study reveals that artistic competence does not proceed upward across all media as the child matures. (JN)

Discusses two studies of English speakers' understanding of the English spelling system. Comparative analysis suggests that seven-year-olds are as sophisticated as adults in extracting many of the linguistic factors which influence stress assignment, but they lack the "heterogeneous" structure of the lexicon that is characteristic of the…

Presents data supporting the belief that reading stories to children is particularly beneficial and explains that hearing stories read aloud familiarizes children with the language of books and with the characteristic narrative structures they will meet in school. (JL)

Teachers can deal with language disordered children through discourse analysis, a conversational teaching process aimed at getting children to talk. Steps include selecting a topic to talk about during the remedial language session, having teacher and child take turns talking about the topic, using requests to constrain the child's responses so…

The author describes ACT (Acting Out Central Theme), a method for dealing with psychomotor, cognitive, and affective domains in slow readers. The ACT approach involves three sessions which focus on discussion of a theme such as friendship, presentaton of the theme as a skit, and assignment of topics to individual students. (SW)

Three experiments examined the perception of a three-way voicing contrast by monolingual speakers of English. The results demonstrate that the perceptual mechanisms used by adults in categorizing stop consonants can be modified easily with simple laboratory techniques in a short period of time. (Author/PN)