This oral language program, designed for children ages 3 to 5, is divided into 11 sections covering the themes of self and senses; family, home, and friends; teddy bears; school and community; colors; food; animals; clothes; summer fun; holidays; and vehicles. Numerous cutouts are provided to prepare for the activities in this book, and each…

The development of computer courseware for Danish high school students of intermediate French is described. Five areas are addressed. First, the hardware and capabilities of the computer are noted. Second, the traditional methods of Danish second language instruction are outlined, focusing on the role of oral communication and written text in the…

Many researchers now believe that the representations and processes underlying syntactical development are specific to a "language faculty." If so, reference animacy would not be expected to influence acquisition of linguistic structures such as the passive sentence construction. Specifically, children should be comparably able to…

Defining listening as the active and conscious process of hearing, recognizing, and interpreting or comprehending language, this guide provides numerous activities to promote the listening skills of primary and intermediate grade students. Specifically, the activities described seek to develop (1) the ability of young students to listen…

If people can evoke mental images when listening to a story, they can extend the process by turning words on a printed page into speech and evoke images for the "speech on the page." This is an exercise for reading comprehension that does not come naturally but can be worked on deliberately. A few moments of self-observation, when…

A study of Korean children's interpretation of the reflexive pronoun "caki" when it precedes a third person noun phrase, that is, in backward anaphora, had as subjects 4- to 11-year-old children living in Korea. Test sentences designed on the basis of two important syntactic aspects in Korean reflexive anaphora--relational hierarchy and…

While most people know how conversations, narratives, and other types of discourse are created in their native language, it is difficult for students to know how they are created in a second language. To deal with texts in a new language, the learner needs extensive exposure to a variety of language in realistic situations. The immediate recall…

Noting that research and theory building in the area of listening have evolved from a variety of disciplines, this paper examines the contributions to listening theory made by humanistic psychology. The paper first offers an overview of humanistic psychology, examining some of the basic assumptions and postulates that serve as a foundation for…

A series of lessons, designed to provide adult students of English as a second language with experience in listening to English, are intended for beginning students who can recognize only isolated words within a stream of speech. Some more advanced listening practice, including recognition of phrases and formulas, and exercises in understanding…

Study skills are acquired abilities; they are processes for learning. They can and must be taught in elementary school classrooms. This is best done through activities which are integrated and practiced in all areas of the curriculum. Teachers can start teaching study skills with the three lesson plans on listening, notetaking, and testing that…

A four-part discussion on cultural sensitivity and good listening skills in development professionals is presented. It is noted that there is much in their educational regimen which militates against developing these habits of mind. It is hypothesized that much of this problem resides in the hidden cultural meanings of professionalism in general…

A study investigated Japanese 3-to-5-year-olds' comprehension of sentences using the temporal terms "before" and "after" and examined whether contextual information helped the children respond correctly. The children were asked to perform a task with a toy either before or after performing another task with a different toy.…

Four classroom exercises for second language instruction are described. In the first exercise, the teacher tells a story from a skeleton outline. Then the teacher pairs the students, provides them with a series of questions about the story, and invites them to cross out the ones they do not like and then to ask their preferred questions of another…

To determine whether story mapping would improve reading comprehension, five intermediate grade students with mild learning handicaps and poor comprehension were prepared to use story mapping procedures as a schema-building technique. As they were reading, students learned to identify the setting, problem, goal, action, and outcome of narrative…

Two experiments investigated preschoolers' acquisition of spatial words in Mandarin Chinese. In one experiment, 5 groups of 10 children at 34, 39, 46, 52, and 57 months were tested for comprehension and production of 14 pairs of Chinese spatial words. In the comprehension test the children were asked to point to pictures corresponding to the words…