Examines objections to the study of language and linguistics in secondary education and suggests that it is time to resolve the false dichotomy between English literature and English language by providing a modest optional language element in A-level English. (Author/RK)

A nation's language is on the order of a natural resource--subject, like the other, to depletion, the ravages of pollution, thoughtless neglect. Suggests the development of an American Academy like unto the French Academy which would diligently establish "sure rules to our language, rendering it pure, eloquent, and capable of treating the arts and…

Reviews recent ERIC documents which focus on the relationships between reading and writing and which suggest that the facilitating effects of one practice upon the other can be delineated through careful research. (HOD)

Research indicates that reading aloud to children significantly improves their vocabulary knowledge and their reading comprehension while affecting reading interests and language development. (DD)

This paper discusses C. Chomsky's 1969 paper on children's syntactic development and the subsequent studies made to test her findings. Later studies indicate that Chomsky's results were not clearly differentiated, and a slight alteration in procedure changes results significantly. (CHK)

Study 1 explored associations between multiple measures of language and symbolic gesture development across ages 3 and 4; Study 2 measured more finely which aspects of language relate to the symbolic representation of actions with objects, and explored associations between symbolic gesture and general intellectual ability. Results showed…

Compares the many-perspectives account of lexical acquisition--which proposes that children learn to take alternative perspectives along with the words they acquire--to the one-perspective account--which proposes that children are at first able to use only one term to talk about an object or event. Provides evidence from a variety of sources that…

Explores what the "Literacy Debate" is and why it has a high profile in the popular media. Reviews the New Literacy Studies (NLS, a series of writings that treat language and literacy as social practices rather than technical skills to be learned in formal education) and the new understandings of language and literacy on which the NLS are based.…

Reed believes the proper study of psychology is not mind or stimulus-response phenomena but ways animals (including humans) encounter the world. In this view, animals are seen in environmental and evolutionary contexts; a fundamental concept is not mind or behavior but affordance or what environments offer animals; and new topics, such as…

In a response to Halliday (1993), Gee (1994) discussed the analogies between learning a language and learning in general. The article presents two of his proposals and discusses an empirical method for studying them. The article focuses on identifying the units acquired during language learning and the relevance of the concept of an innate…

Examined the existence of preschoolers' assumption of one-proper-name-to-one-individual in their word learning. Subjects were 90 4-year olds. Found that children were likely to interpret a word as a proper name if it was applied to one instead of two objects. However, children overrode this default assumption if sufficient contextual information…

This paper locates computational and behavioral studies of children's language learning in a theoretical framework; reviews four articles in this journal issue on learning word meanings and sounds and on setting grammatical parameters; highlights "autonomous bootstrapping" strategies that children use to represent uncertain linguistic…

Examines acquisition of the Philadelphian short "a" by 3- and 4-year-old children. Despite the complexity, the children generally matched the short "a" distribution of both their parents and adult Philadelphians interviewed in the mid-1970s. Results indicate that even the youngest community members are actively participating in…

Argues that French-speaking children age 3;0 to 6;0 (and older) produce relative clauses without moving lexical relative phrases to a clause-initial position. This article contrasts three accounts of this fact and concludes that the account stating that relative clauses are produced without syntactic "wh"-movement provides the best…