This report documents the activities undertaken to evaluate the state-sponsored prekindergarten program for at-risk 4-year-olds conducted by the Saginaw, Michigan school district. Entitled Michigan Early Childhood Education Preschool (MECEP), this program was serving 280 children at the beginning of the 1993 school year. The process evaluation…

This essay advances a definition of language disadvantage and applies Cummins' theory of language acquisition to a model of assessment designed to determine the existence and degree of language disadvantage. Language disadvantage is defined as the difference between a person's ability to learn a language compared to that same person's actual…

A group of studies on child language development between ages 2 and 3 is presented. The studies, originally published between 1970 and 1989, are the result of a longitudinal research program. An introductory section describes the contents, offers background information on several different perspectives (developmental, learnability, cross-cultural)…

Continuing an emphasis from earlier editions on such areas as early education and the use of electronic teaching aids as an integral aspect of the classroom program, this book views language arts instruction as based on a comprehensive instruction plan composed of many different teaching strategies and types of materials. This edition of the book…

All speakers alter language stylistically in response to particular social circumstances at the moment of speech. Additionally, bilingual speakers switch codes. In fact, language differentiation and code switching are fundamental to behaving bilingually. This article examines how language differentiation and code switching developed in a young…

An interactive/cognitive model can account for the acquisition of a graphophonemic system by young children and be compatible with the cuing explanation, which posits that readers use their graphophonemic knowledge in coordination with their knowledge of language and the world to make sense of print. Explanations in the research literature of how…

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) programs, characterized by the special needs of the language learners, are described and a review of the literature on a functional-notional approach to the syllabus design of ESP programs is presented. It is suggested that effective ESP programs should teach the language skills necessary to function and perform…

A study of children's acquisition of the auxiliary verb system in English is reported. The first section describes the operation of the auxiliary system, and proposes that the behavior of auxiliaries is so complicated that if children were to generalize from one auxiliary to another, they would make predictable errors. The second section reviews…

A study investigated how Cantonese children acquire word order in the locative system, which is very complex in their native language. Focus was on three semantic categories: static location, locative source, and locative goal. Subjects were 32 monolingual Cantonese children aged 2.5 to 5.9 in four age groups. Each subject performed four tasks,…

A distributional analysis of parent-child conversational interactions for three large longitudinal corpora is reported. First, the potential role of conversational interaction in language learning is examined, and it is argued that certain sources of conversational input provide children with excellent opportunities to advance their linguistic…

A fundamental problem in language acquisition is determining how children learn the formal vocabulary of the adult grammar. A proposed solution is the Semantic Bootstrapping Hypothesis (SBH), which states that children infer the identity of syntactic entities such as "subject" in input based on the presence of semantic entities such as…

The study compared play among five groups of children (ages 3-7 years): normal children (N=41); those diagnosed with language delays (N=241), those with autism but normal intelligence (N=71), those with autism and mental retardation (N=97), and those with nonautistic mental deficiency (N=86). Each child was evaluated using a 25 minute structured…

This text is designed to assist in the replication of a successful classroom-home language intervention program for mildly to moderately language impaired preschool children. The first portion of the manual discusses the rationale and operation of the program. Provided in the second part are sample lesson plans which provide specific examples of…

A 5-year followup study was conducted of Spanish/English bilingual children and their families who had participated in a previous study of early bilingual acquisition when the children were 3 to 4 years old. Language use and interaction patterns by parents, children, and siblings were observed at home. School achievement information and interview…

The report presents findings of a 3-year investigation of a language intervention program for young children (3-6 years old) with serious language disabilities. The model features a communication game approach to teach linguistic elements through stress on meaningful conversation. An initial chapter describes project aims and accomplishments and…