Describes Audio-Lectal Practice, a technique which offers systematic and controlled practice in connected discourse while emphasizing oral discourse features of rhythm, tempo, pausing, and suprasegmental patterns. Students listen to, read along with, and imitate recorded texts concurrently. Such practice facilitates oral fluency in the target…

Reports that extending practice in oral language skills from kindergarten through the primary grades has a significant impact on Mexican American students' performance on a reading test. (FL)

Results suggest that, among nursery and kindergarten children, metaphoric processes exist early in development, as exemplified by a high frequency of spontaneous metaphor in the free play of young children. The content and cognitive features of these metaphors are discussed and hypotheses are offered for the decline of metaphor use with age.…

The author draws attention to the closed network of social settings in India which have built-in devices to frustrate any advance for interview or conversation. He maintains that adult education does not mean teaching the mother tongue, but teaching a philosophy of change and structural reconstruction through the mother tongue. (Author/ CT)

Compares the use of sentence weight and the T-unit in measuring the oral language of 32 adolescents. Indicates the relative merits of the T-unit as a measure of oral language, because the two measures appeared to give much the same information about the speech samples examined. (RL)

If the beginning spellers are allowed to experiment, their ability will begin to evolve and refine as did their patterns of spoken language. Stages of spelling development and their parallels in oral language development are described and tips on how to foster spelling development are given. (JN)

The development of children's oral language ability, speaking, and listening, is examined in light of recent research and its implications for language arts teachers. (HTH)

Questions the validity of some child language studies that measure cognitive ability by the degree of complexity of the linguistic expression. Claims that these studies ignore many facets of the children's sociocultural experience as well as the influence of situational factors on their choice of linguistic codes, perpetuating socially biased…

Challenges the hypothesis that different linguistic codes are specifically related to different social groups, observing that children's language usage shows qualitative differences determined by the situations they face rather than by their sociocultural background. Supports this observation with an analysis of children's attempts to explain the…

Outlines some of the problems children encounter while developing communicative competency. Discusses ways to assess an individual child's communicative abilities and the ways that language development research can help teachers enhance those abilities. (HTH)

Establishes the validity of the Picture Potency Formula as a tool to predict the extent to which children will respond to pictures. (FL)

Examined young children's language productivity with newly learned forms by teaching them four new words: two nouns and two verbs. Findings indicate children combined the novel nouns productively with already known words much more often than they did the novel verbs--by many orders of magnitude and several children pluralized the new nouns,…

Examines the possibility that bilingual experience in infancy may affect the unfolding of vocal precursors to speech. The results of this longitudinal study indicate that infants reared in bilingual and monolingual environments manifested similar ages of onset for canonical babbling (production of well-formed syllables), an event fundamentally…

Reviews recent research into the qualitative and quantitative aspects of fluency to more clearly define the word as a performance descriptor for oral assessment of foreign language learners and as an indicator of progress in language learning. The concept of fluency is confused and multilayered when used in the assessment of oral performance. (22…

Uses interview and telephone survey data to demonstrate that the merger of the vowels in words such as "cot" and "caught," traditionally considered a defining characteristics of the speech of western Pennsylvania, is well established in the mining towns of eastern Pennsylvania. Notes that the data indicate that the merger arose…