The many ways in which children use language are examined in this paper, and classroom implications are outlined. The first part of the paper discusses such topics as young children's focus on meaning in language, teachers' tendency to examine language in terms of form rather than meaning, and the importance of the student/teacher interaction…

The creative oral language elicited from 45 preoperational and 40 concrete operational first grade students was analyzed to study the relationship between cognitive development and the types of case relationships produced. Each child's language was analyzed for eight noun/verb relationships, including state, process, action, experience, location,…

This bulletin is published annually in the interest of children with learning disabilities, language disabilities, or dyslexia. The 22 articles discuss the following topics: current issues in dyslexia, language disorders, subgroups in dyslexia, specificity and parameters in defining dyslexia, strategies for recognition and management of reading…

Four booklets comprise this document. One is the Dade County Test of Langugae Development (Receptive), Test 1--Elementary, a series of pictures used to measure the aural comprehension of elementary school students whose primary language is not English. There are English and Spanish editions of the teacher's manual, which include testing…

A research project combining ethnographic and experimental methods is currently underway to assess whether minority groups use language in ways that put their children at a disadvantage in school. The project, which focuses on social, cognitive, and educational consequences of different patterns of language function and use, has involved…

Based on the assumption that the same conditions that promote talk in the preschool years might continue to promote oracy if they could be replicated in schools, this paper investigates conditions most likely to promote growth in oral communication, summarizes the findings of two relevant Australian research studies, and draws implications for…

Developmental behaviors are listed for children from birth to 6 years for gross motor, fine motor, self help, expressive and receptive language, psycho/social, and cognitive skills. Skills are broken down into 6-month intervals for the first year, and 1-year intervals from age 1 to 6. (CL)

Described is a structured, team-teaching, developmental approach for use with multiply handicapped children between the ages of 3 and 7. The program is explained to be child-centered, to involve individualized work and small group lessons, and to use the unit approach. Task analysis and developmental sequencing of skills are performed for each of…

Two semantic theories of word learning, a perceptual complexity hypothesis (H. Clark, 1970) and a quantitative complexity hypothesis (E. Clark, 1972) were tested by teaching 24 preschoolers and 16 college students CVC labels for five polar spatial adjective concepts having single word representations in English, and for three having no direct…

The Yale Child Welfare Research Program was a comprehensive, service centered, longitudinal, intervention project for low-income families and their children. Eighteen children from inner city, low-income, predominantly black families participated in the intervention program from before birth to 30 months of age. Each family was assigned a team of…

The three projects described in this paper were based on the intrinsic connection between language and the structure of perception and action. The first project explored the role of nonverbal frameworks in the development of communication between mother and child, beginning with the first word. It emphasized the role of the mother in the creation…

The Speech Communication Association's National Project on Speech Communication Competencies yielded a developmental perspective of functional communication, from which implications for lifelong learning can be derived. The project resulted in the following contributions: a definition of communication competence; a description of the child as a…

This paper summarizes the results of a longitudinal study of a child native speaker of French acquiring English. The observation period covered the child's progress from age 4 years, 9 months to age 5 years, 8 months. An analysis was made of the acquisition of the interrogative and negative structures and of nine grammatical morphemes. In…

Investigations of the growth of children's communicative behavior and ability, in terms of their interactions with media and their communication with other people, are described in this book. The first chapter presents an overview of the studies, explains the developmental perspective that characterizes them, and identifies some issues fundamental…

The manual presents sequences of skills designed for use as guides to teaching/learning objectives and as a basis for evaluating and recording special education students' progress. It is explained that the goal of the first level of objectives (sequenced in this document) is to enable the student to function at a motor/psychomotor state of…