Evaluated were the effects of therapeutic procedures (crawling, creeping, response to sensory stimulation, and patterning) carried out by neurological organization rehabilitationists on the language and social competence of nine 2-to 8-year-old neurologically handicapped children and on the children's families. (MC)

In order to investigate the development of word-formation abilities, 3-, 5-, and 7-year-olds were asked to act out with toys, judge, and make up sentences containing instances of class extension. Some sample sentences are "Can you upside-down the clown?" and "Broom the spoon." Children dealt with such sentences in much the same…

The 1975 report "Toward a Literate Society," commissioned by the United States Commissioner of Education, displays the following weaknesses among others: in making recommendations the editors ignore or contradict information contained in the individual papers; many issues relevant to literacy are omitted; and the report virtually ignores…

Although the study of the acquisition of a first language has been split by a controversy between the "innatists" and the "behaviorists," neither group has given enough consideration to the relationship between language development and the other developments of the child (social, cognitive, and perceptual). This collection of readings links the…

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…

Children's well-developed oral language skills obviously facilitate their reading and learning to read. In contrast to a traditional position which contends that reading comprehension equals oral comprehension skills plus decoding, this paper claims that a child must learn (and, perhaps, unlearn) many more skills in the transition from oral…

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…

A question of both theoretical and practical importance for the study of phonological development is whether there is a difference in the status of productions rendered spontaneously by the child and those repeated by the child after either an adult model or his own production. The relevant theoretical questions are: (1) Are all the child's…

Thirteen doctoral dissertations and five masters theses are summarized in this report of research on the disadvantaged child. Contained in each individual summary are the detailed descriptions of the experimental task, the results obtained and the analysis of these results. The eighteen individual theses are concerned with topics such as:…

This discussion is divided into three parts: (1) [native] language acquisition versus [second] language learning, (2) successful language learning, and (3) teaching strategies (grammar-translation, direct, cognitive and cognitive habit-formation). (KM)

Intended for the language arts teacher, this book focuses on how to develop children's language skills. The opening chapter of the book presents a brief overview of child language acquisition, children's language abilities at a particular age, and how these abilities develop. The second chapter, on the importance of children's literature, is based…

Written from a developmental interactionist viewpoint, this guide for teachers provides practical and useful ideas for working with infants through 9-year-olds. (Developmental interactionists contend that activities designed to foster one area of a child's development will tend to foster development in other areas as well.) Section I of the guide…

Operation Rewrite, a program developed for use in English instruction in Quebec (Canada), is a constructive teaching-learning method for increasing students' linguistic competency in written discourse. The program provides middle and secondary school students with structured exercises to study and rewrite, using the author's exact format but with…