Focusing on communicative competence as a major concept in speech communication, the author discusses the implications for theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical activities. Theoretical concerns generated by this focus are: characterization of the knowledge which comprises communicative competence, description of rules for appropriate…

This report comprises a critical analysis of research in the area of the disadvantaged student, mostly on population characteristics and on educational programs offered them. Much of the research on such factors as genetic and environmental influences, verbal ability, motivation, school achievement, attrition rate, demographic characteristics,…

This book was written to clarify the role that theatre plays in the life of children. Its contents include a prologue, eleven chapters, and an epilogue. In the prologue, the truly educated person is described as one who has learned to make controlled use of all his capacities. Participation in role-playing experiences, such as involvement with the…

This paper discusses the validity and role of linguistic theory in terms of philosophy and logic and considers the relationship among these fields of human knowledge. The main objective of linguistic science is to discover the composition laws actually used by speech communities at any given moment in history. Linguistics is therefore not…

An experiment assessed the potential effectiveness of "dual audio television instruction" (DATI) as a mass education medium. The DATI consisted of a radio program heard by children while they watched television shows. The audio instructor did not talk when the television characters spoke, but used the "quiet" times to help with…

A simply constructed, psychometrically sound testing procedure which enables the instructor to assess higher cognitive process with respect to the material in questions, and which is amenable to machine scoring, is described. It involves the application of the word association technique long used in psychoanalysis to the classroom setting. The…

The purpose of this study was to collect data from which the cognitive processes of the prekindergarten child could be analyzed. The study population consisted of 53 subjects, 3-1/2-4-1/2 years old. Kindergarten Evaluation of Learning Potential (KELP) was used to obtain data. The learning theory on which KELP is based postulates associative,…

A study directed toward the education of preschool children is presented. This study, the Appalachia Preschool Education Program, was designed to affect the performance of children aged 3, 4, and 5 in four skill areas: orienting and attending, motor activity, language, and cognition. One of the instruments used in the evaluation of the program was…

The subject of language learning of children in bilingual families is considered in this paper. The author discusses practical problems and provides examples from his own family situation in which his children learned French, English, and German. The possibility of language mixture is discussed and the author presents some tentative conclusions…

One of the several causal mechanisms for errors made by adult second language learners is interference from the native language. This paper attempts to account for the cognitive nature of interference by proposing two psycholinguistically based principles that will explain various types of production and perception errors made of second language…

Grounded in a review of existing theories and research on problem solving, the theoretical base and new instrument development efforts discussed in this publication have been sounded against the needs of an innovative, interdisciplinary curriculum project called Unified Science and Mathematics for Elementary Schools (USMES). It is the work on new…

Controversy exists regarding the nature of the creative process and strategies which hold maximum promise for accelerating creative production. This paper provides a structural overview of the major problems and issues found in the scientific study of creativity, primarily in regard to dimensionality and criterion choice. (KS)

Factor analysis accounts for most of the variance in adult ratings of concepts with adjectives. Affective reactions are present in young infants, but still to be explored is how the stable adult factor structure develops from these reactions. Three questions are investigated in this study: (1) is this factor structure present in 3- and…

This paper explores similarities and differences between Kohlberg's Piagetian or cognitive-developmental view of edcuation and Bruno Bettelheim's psychoanalytic view which stresses the motivational qualities of children's thought. Based on observations of his son, Kohlberg suggests that children's playful attitudes, like their serious ones,…

In this paper early and later development of knowledge of syntactic structures and this development in language-disordered children are reviewed. Theories that have been presented to account for syntactic development (cognitive, cognitive-semantic and social-environmental) are discussed. Early developmental data indicate that there is not a…