This collection of articles about children's literature contains the following articles: "Books in the Life of the Young Child" and "Traditional Literature: Children's Legacy" by Bernice E. Cullinan, "Encouraging Language Growth" by John Warren Stewig, "Promoting Language and Concept Development" by Dorothy S. Strickland, "Fostering Understanding…

This paper proposes a study of the writing performance of superior twelfth graders and college English majors in three types of discourse: expressive, explanatory, and persuasive. The primary purpose of the study is descriptive, though the results of the descriptive analysis will permit a comparison of twelfth graders' writing with college…

Several recent reports on the untutored second language acquisition of English have suggested that the same developmental sequence holds for the acquisition of the interrogative structures irrespective of whether English is acquired as a first language (L1) or a second language (L2). These studies have been conducted within the Klima & Bellugi…

The ability to produce and recognize paraphrases is necessary for a child's linguistic development. The purpose of this paper is to explain how three basic sentence types interact with age in determining the strategy a child uses in producing paraphrases. Three paraphrase strategies considered are lexical substitution, syntactic rearrangement, and…

Describing the dialectics of theoretical versus applied linguistics and sociological data, this study compares the average achievement in French of Spanish-speaking learners (Chicanos in a southwestern university) with English-speaking monolinguals. Although Spanish and French belong to the Romance Languages and share a great number of cognates…

To assess and then compare stages of language acquisition in disabled readers with those identified by Chomsky in a study of normal readers, a study examined (1) whether the order of emergence of certain syntactic structures is the same for six to ten-year old disabled readers as it was for Chomsky's normal readers, (2) whether there are…

Public hearings were held to assess citizens' views about providing bilingual education for preschool children in California. Contents of this report, consisting of six brief papers, discuss the value of early bilingual education, the assessment of bilingual proficiency in young children, and preschool curriculum design. Parent participation,…

For many White Mountain Apache children, their first contact with the English language occurs in Head Start and day care programs, thus forcing them to learn to read and write a language they seldom use. This situation led the tribe to develop an Apache bilingual/bicultural program in which an orthography based on the letters of the English…

Two levels of stimulus condition were used to determine whether or not the amount of salient information contained in the perceptual stimuli accompanying orally presented "wh-questions" (those including the concepts who, what, where, when, how and why) facilitates children's comprehension. Conditions varied in terms of the number of…

A study was undertaken to explore how five-year-old children approach becoming literate. Interviews consisting of eight core questions were conducted with each of 20 kindergarten children. The questions dealt with children's concepts about reading and writing, and about the purposes children establish for writing. Accompanying each set of…

Children's speech styles vary considerably, ranging along a continuum from formal to informal, in the various educational and social settings they encounter in school. Teachers who see their role as preparing children to fill social roles will be aware of the speech styles that children use and will accept varying speech styles as appropriate to…

A paper by Keenan and Klein (1975) provided evidence for the hypothesis that conversationality is present in children as young as 2 and 1/2 years of age. Results of the study indicated that before the emergence of more adult-like coherency operations, the children passed through a period in which such operations were foreshadowed by vocal play.…

There are several things that English teachers at all educational levels need to know about linguistics. They must know, for example, that the terms "grammar,""dialect," and "register" have special meanings for the linguist. In addition, they must know the following: (1) regardless of language, a normal child will…

A study is reported whose purpose was to investigate if a relationship existed between Spanish and English language development in young Spanish speaking Mexican-Americans. One half of the children involved in the study were in maintenance bilingual-bicultural programs. The other half were in pull-out ESL programs. Using the descriptive survey…