Described is how the utilization of the science classroom for the development of language skills, particularly in the area of writing. Suggested activities include crossword puzzles, poetry, puppet shows, comic books and letter writing. (Author/DS)

Describes ERIC resources that present research on children's language usage and development and that suggest activities for the promotion of language development. (ET)

Discusses background information about the deaf that may be useful to reading teachers working with older deaf students; suggests additional sources of information on sign language and reading instruction for the deaf. (MKM)

A nonverbal paradigm for assessing conservation based on an operant discrimination learning procedure is described. Initial results suggest that young children who could not conserve within the traditional verbal procedure were more likely to demonstrate conservation within the nonverbal paradigm and that traditional Piagetian tasks are verbally…

Discusses language as a goal and a means to learning and presents strategies for in-school development of language across the curriculum in the context of consideration of effects on students. (HTH)

Discusses the development of drama as a learning tool for children's language development. Applies James Britton's methods of language classification to the construction of functional categories of language that operate within the framework of drama and creative dramatics. (RL)

Discusses the implications for language teaching of Chomskyean and transformational theory. The notions of deep structure, linguistic theory building, and inutility of a corpus are far less interesting than the view of language as rule-governed behavior and language learning as hypothesis-testing. Rationalist v behaviorist theories are discussed.…

If the basic operations hypothesis (EJ 184 227) is interpreted as a general principle governing acquisition of all movement rules, it may obscure the fact that children distinguish between unbounded and local rules. Error patterns support this distinction, lending credence to theories with separate status for the two rule types. (Author/RD)

From a review of studies of the relationship between cultural experience and language development, it is evident that ways must be found to aid children from impoverished backgrounds to use their basic intelligence to operate in the verbally oriented tasks demanded in the academic domain. (Author/EB)

Considers how literature and the modern media influence the quality of children's language development. Provides samples of student responses and student writings, showing how they react to literature and learn from it. (RL)

Describes the development of an instrument that identifies what children who are just beginning first grade reading instruction know about the written language code and relates this knowledge to beginning reading achievement. (HOD)

Presents results of a study of the impact of the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) program on children in India. Significant gains in language development and a greater interest in acquiring knowledge were found among children who viewed the SITE programs. (JMF)

Findings of this Israeli study suggest that perception is affected by lables, learning, and selective attention; that these effects are determined developmentally; and that as age increases, the effects of verbal cues diminish, while the effects of perceptual cues increase. (Author/DLS)

Presents an outline for a theory of syntax acquisition, surveys other approaches to language acquisition, and addresses the following methodological issues: (1) the relevance of linguistic theory to the model; (2) how the model is tested; and (3) the domain of the theory. (Author/AM)

Considers the signed speech of nonverbal children and the unsigned speech that evolves. Discusses possible explanations for signed speech as a development of linguistic functions. Makes suggestions for research on the relationship between language acquisition by nonverbal children and by normal infants. (PMJ)