This resource book (in English) is part of a series of early French immersion program teaching guides--all written in French--and is designed particularly for teachers who are new to the early immersion program. It is divided into three parts: (1) suggestions and practical information for teachers including questions and answers to frequent…

Delaware's standards for modern language curriculum content in public schools are provided for teachers' use in coordinating instruction. Teachers are encouraged to use communicative, student-centered classroom activities and to reinforce and expand the material in successive instructional units. The guide consists of introductory sections on the…

Reading failure can be eliminated by the year 2000 if reading teachers believe it can be done, can develop the new procedures needed to make their dreams come true, and are willing to make fundamental changes in how they teach reading. Phonic utility research clearly indicates that phonics instruction is neither dependable nor useful. The current…

A study investigated children's difficulty in learning color words and attempted to determine whether the difficulty was perceptual, conceptual, or linguistic. The subjects were 24 two-year-olds, half with knowledge of color words and half without, and a similar control group. The experimental subjects were given conceptual and comprehension tasks…

This paper describes techniques used by a German instructor with American students during a summer abroad program. Learning activities, both in and outside of class, concentrate on writing. The students keep logs and diaries, which force them to be aware of their surroundings and to participate more actively in the life around them. With the…

The position this paper assumes views vocabulary not as single words but as phrases, sentences, and sometimes entire segments of discourse that act as single words. This view of vocabulary would be helpful in: (1) bringing the vocabulary aspect of instruction in English as a second language (ESL) closer to current research in language performance,…

For Spanish-speaking children, simple stories in Spanish, told in a natural language suitable for their age, are not only entertaining, but a means of developing vocabulary and concepts. Non-Spanish-speaking children, too, need exposure to more language than they can understand word for word. However, the simple stories for the Spanish speaker…

In this study, two different approaches to the teaching of reading were designed and presented over an eight-week period, then evaluated according to student scores on three standardized tests. After a pretest, nine first-grade classes were randomly assigned to one of three groups: literature, concept development, or control. In the literature…

This exploratory study was conducted to interpret age and individual differences in 48 kindergarteners' and second graders' performance on a referential communication task in light of the Pascual-Leone Theory of Constructive Operations, a neo-Piagetian theory of cognitive development. Stimulus materials were black and white photographs of dogs,…

Discusses using key words as carriers of meaning for sentences, offering sample sentences in the fields of (1) dictation and guided narration, (2) structural pattern drills, (3) spoken dialog, and (4) silent reading. Here key words are important in deducing the meaning of new words. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

The Enrichment Triad Model proposed by Joseph Renzulli offers guidelines for planning instruction for gifted students that can foster wide reading for specific purposes. The model is based on three different types of enrichment. The first type includes general exploratory activities designed to expose learners to areas in which they may be…

One of the prevalent misconceptions that severely limits the possibilities of curriculum change in schools is the belief that theory has no direct relevance to pedagogical problems and that what is really needed are practical ideas for classroom instruction. Serious curriculum change requires an explicit dependence upon improved applications of…

Forty-four junior high school students were randomly assigned to two vocabulary instruction treatments. One treatment used context-rich, three-sentence passages as sources for target word definition. The other, the semantic mapping treatment, entailed learning new words by identifying the similarities and differences with related, known words.…

The most important consideration with regard to classroom use of films in an English as a second language (ESL) class is that it should be previewed by the teacher and selected according to criteria such as those suggested here. In example, short silent films that are uncluttered in appearance are good vehicles for teaching vocabulary. Some…

A study explored a potential aptitude-by-treatment interaction associated with the keyword method of vocabulary acquisition. This method is a two-stage mnemonic process whereby an unfamiliar term is first transformed into a familiar concrete stimulus and then a thematic relationship is created between the transformed stimulus and the information…