Most children have visited a city even if they don't live in one. Build on your students' city experience through a learning center. Here are some activities that will help city children visualize the geographic location of their neighborhoods within the city while they learn language and math skills and about social studies and art activities.…

This study chronicles the process in which a young child teaches herself to write the letters of the alphabet. (HOD)

This critique points out weaknesses regarding the test measures used by Munsinger and Douglass and questions the validity of these measures for the ages of the children used in their study. (JMB)

Found that older students speak in a more mature manner than younger ones when presented with paraphrasing tasks. (DD)

Discusses a study which sought to determine the degree to which the reading activities in one school district's elementary schools are matched to certain psycholinguistic concepts. Concludes that, until teachers become more aware of how language works and what the reading processes are, reading instruction will continue to overemphasize the visual…

Reviews the literature concerning the importance of a child's oral language in learning to read. (JM)

Notes the positive attributes and shortcommings of Halliday's model for children's language development. (RL)

This study examined the differential effects on a learning task of two different types of comprehension measures. (SB)

A good listening climate, reciprocal planning for oral and aural comprehension, analysis of the purpose and method in which the task is executed, will all provide some beginning points for the serious teacher who wants to build listening comprehension on the strengths of skills operating since birth. (Author/NQ)

Testing of a group of kindergarten children generally supported the hypotheses that (1) children from schools in higher socioeconomic areas would have significantly more advanced concepts of language than children in lower socioeconomic areas and (2) that this conceptual development would be correlated with more conventional measures of reading…

Proposes that phonological development involves the three fundamental processes of perception, organization and production. Acquisition proceeds by the suppression of natural phonological processes in a systematic fashion. Processes slide through a child's system, appearing first as constraints on perception, and later on organization and…

This study constitutes the beginning of a longitudinal investigation of phonological development of four children from birth to 2 years. Little variation was found in mean fundamental frequency. Duration, within-utterance range and variability did show developmental change. (RM)

The nature of the task of defining words by means of other words and the development of language responses (from children aged four to seven) are discussed in terms of a linguistic analysis of the definitional form and its semantic relations. (Author/RM)