Knowledge of what constitutes development toward language maturity in school-age children should enable us to make substantial improvements in the language component of the curriculum. (Author)

The Survival of literature is contingent upon what is considered literature and how literature and language are taught. (Author)

Teachers can help students increase their range of registers by being aware of and encouraging their students' linguistic efforts and encouraging students' control over literate" forms. (Author/JB)

Discusses the results of an examination of the scripts used in eight television programs popular with teenagers that indicate that viewers are exposed to short, simple sentences and largely unsophisticated language structures. (AEA)

Discusses various sociological issues of bilingual education, including language and ethnicity, language planning, nonstandard versus standard, and language maintenance. Types of bilingual education are described. (EKN)

Normal, first-born children of two-parent, self-supporting families (N=60) were divided into three groups at birth: control, mothers receiving a specific language stimulation program, and both parents receiving the program simultaneously. Infants whose parents received simultaneous training exhibited the greatest gain over 4 1/2 months in Bayley…

A longitudinal study examined two-year-olds' acquisition of the English auxiliary system after a six-week exposure to additional auxiliary input in varying sentence contexts. Results indicated that subjects did not significantly differ from a baseline group that did not receive additional input. (Author/CB)

An assessment of the substantive progress made regarding the study of language contact and bilingualism in the Hispanic world explores research concerning language contact and grammars, the bilingual speech community and linguistic structure, and bilingual discourse. (45 references) (CB)

Describes class activities for incorporating and teaching about opera into the Italian language instruction classroom, focusing on the enhancement of cultural knowledge and understanding that opera offers. (CB)

David Bilingual Learning Center (Tucson, AZ) blends academic and cultural learning into an enriching experience through an elementary magnet program which teaches language arts, mathematics, social studies, and science in students' native languages of either English or Spanish and then incorporates the second language through a "Language of the…

Elementary and secondary students (N=150) were given a forced-choice task of idiom understanding. Performance on tasks steadily improved with age, and idioms with higher familiarity and transparency were easier for students to understand. Results support the language experience model of figurative language development and the hypothesis that…

Reasserts, in response to a review of a book about language immersion programs, that the linguistic failure of immersion programs has major theoretical implications, focusing on the failure of immersion students to reach nativelike language proficiency and the failure to emphasize language accuracy. (two references) (CB)

A review of the language laboratory-related relationships between context and background knowledge, individualization and learner characteristics, feedback and continuing assessment, and focus and sequence supports foreign language teachers' use of eclectic, integrative, and alternative approaches that make full use of language laboratory…

Study of advanced English learners' development of active vocabulary found that the need for greater vocabulary influenced subjects with sufficient communicative competence and no explicit vocabulary instruction to enrich their lexicon. (34 references) (CB)