In order for culturally disadvantaged children to expand their language skills, the classroom teacher must show a positive attitude toward the students and their language.

A teacher describes the results of allowing children in her pre-reading kindergarten class to invent the spellings they needed to communicate through writing. The strategies children employed were found to reflect their developing language abilities. (ED)

The That-Complements test of the Test of Syntactic Abilities was administered to 93 deaf students (age 10-19 years) and 60 hearing students (age 8-11 years). (Author/SBH)

This first report--necessarily a selective account--is an attempt to give a broad view of current developmental work in the field of language, increasingly a focus of concern in these post-bullock times. (Editor)

Children should be exposed to a rich linguistic environment, but language learning tasks cannot and should not be optimally ordered. (DD)

Too much attention is given to drill on the component skills of language and literacy and too little attention to their significant use. Component skills must be used in contexts that require their integration into some larger act that has a personal purpose that binds the parts into the whole. (Author/IRT)

Two stages in the vocabulary development of two-year-olds are reported. In the earlier Receptive stage, the child says many fewer nouns than he understands and says no verbs at all although he understands many. The child then enters a Productive stage in which he says virtually all the nouns he understands plus his first verbs. (Author/DEP)

Reviews research on the relationship between creative dramatics and language development, cognitive development, and attitude change. (DD)

Results indicate that age is a major factor in semantic development throughout the elementary school years and beyond. (DD)

This study investigated the effects of parental models plus nondifferential praise, and expansions plus nondifferential praise on 2-year-old children's spontaneous use of color and size adjective-noun combinations. (Author/SB)

Young children's comprehension and overdiscrimination of natural language concepts were examined by asking 2- and 4-year-old children to select pictorial instances of five concrete semantic concepts. Results suggest that young children initially tend to use concept labels in a very restricted manner. (JMB)

This article discusses an attempt to establish a model of the cognitive strategies used by a child in the acquisition of nouns and the stages in the process of categorizing reality. (Text is in Italian.) (CFM)

The comprehension of big, little, and same number and the production of relational terminology was assessed in 168 preschool children. (Author/BD)

Criticizes the Bullock report for its failure to treat language as "the" medium for the expression of values and as the way of bringing the young to confront the world as it is (complete with history, economics, hunger, poverty and morality) and to seek personal and collective meaning from this "confrontation". (Editor/RK)