Research was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of a 12-week intervention program of individual instruction for disadvantaged preschool children. Based on this pretest, 17 children with IQ scores of 107 or less were selected and placed into experimental and control groups. The experimental group was exposed to individual cognitive and…

The effect of verbal labeling in a serial position short term memory task was investigated. Forty female college students were given 16 trials each. Eight trials involved only central items which had to be recalled. The other eight trials involved both central and incidental items. Half of the subjects verbalized the names of the central items as…

Successful reading practices and programs for culturally disadvantaged children are discussed by five authorities in the field. The first section, written by Gertrude Whipple, defines the kinds of pupils considered to be culturally disadvantaged, tells why they need a special program, and outlines the type of program needed. Three sections deal…

The extended effects of two instructional approaches, the Coordinated Basal Language Arts Approach and the Integrated Experience Approach to Communication, on pupils' language development at the second- and third-grade levels were investigated. Original subjects were 669 first graders who were pretested for readiness and intelligence. Of these,…

This paper presents the historical background and practical applications of "Interlingua," a language system of common words derived from four control languages. Interlingua and "Esperanto," another artificial language, are compared, emphasizing that international, cross-cultural communication is best served, not by the…

In selecting materials for English education (both preservice and inservice), it must be remembered that, although materials alone do not make the difference, selection of resources must be informed and careful. This paper presents guidelines for material selection in the areas of language acquisition, composition, methods for teaching the…

This paper probes the implications for psychology of recent advances in the study of young children's acquisition of communication skills. The inadequacy of traditional ways of thinking about cognitive and social development as a base for developmental psycholinguistics is discussed and the lack of attention to the basic cognitive schemes which…

A total of 194 students, eight intact classes of ninth and tenth graders, were examined for changes in their writing skills after it was determined that significant changes in reading skills had occurred in the experimental groups (four of the eight classes). When the writing samples were analyzed for overall quality, syntactic density, T-unit…

Students' abilities in manipulation and control of syntax may be increased through a sequence of instruction involving the use of exercises termed "Non-Sentence Practice,""Nonsense-Sentences Practice," and "Syntactic Patterning Practice." The final step in the instruction sequence is to make the syntactic exercises pertinent to students' writing…

A study was undertaken to see whether developmental patterns of language acquisition could be discovered in children beyond age five. Specifically, the study attempted to uncover a pattern in the development of the skill of stress interpretation, or the understanding of the effect of emphasis of a particular word on the deep structure of the…

Three papers from this issue of the Working Papers are provided here. "The Nesting Constraint in Child Language," by Patrick Alan Brogan, discusses a child's ability to perform complex, internally embedded sentences. It is hypothesized that difficulty stems from a child's limited short-term memory. "A Framework for Studying Kin Term…

The learning activities in this handbook were taken directly from Tucson Early Education Model (TEEM) classrooms and designed to foster intellectual and language development. More specifically, these activities are designed to foster linguistic awareness, sensory perception, curiosity, and imagination, to guide the child in differentiating fantasy…

This report evaluated the reading and language program in one elementary school which was intended to improve word knowledge, word analysis, and reading comprehension skills for 300 students in grades K through 5. Students who participated in the program were below grade level in reading and language skills. Educational Assistants were assigned to…

This study presents a new version of the cloze procedure used as a placement test for foreign students enrolled in an English language program for non-native speakers. Called the New Cloze Test (NCT), the test was administered to 136 foreign students who were beginning college students and who had not been in the United States longer than one…

This study investigated the agreement between previously published vocabulary lists recommended for use with children and lists derived from the speech of contemporary children in grades one, two, and three in Toronto. In the first part of the study, existing vocabulary lists were compared. In the second part, language samples were collected from…