As classrooms have become more culturally and linguistically diversified, the theories and methods of teaching reading to young children have changed. Early childhood educators must explore new methods of instruction in order to involve and expand the language abilities of young children and must provide engaging activities that will create more…

This collection of papers focuses on how adults communicate with children in institutional settings such as public schools and day care centers, and how professionals in the field of communication disorders communicate among themselves. Papers include: "Introduction: Linguistic Theories and Language Interaction" (Madeline M. Maxwell); "Inuit…

An analysis of utterances made by children and teachers in Norwegian day care centers over a period of several years suggests that from a communicative and functional viewpoint, young children's use of language depends on: (1) the kind of play activitiy; and (2) the preschool teacher's participation and language, which reflects her attitude and…

Native students rank far below norms in reading, language arts, and language arts related subjects. This paper reviews the literature to address strategic plans for reading and language arts curricula for Native students. An overview is presented of theories of first and second language acquisition and learning, stages of language development, and…

A study investigated how Chinese children and adults interpreted sentences containing universal quantifiers and existential quantifiers. The purpose was to get preliminary evidence on whether Chinese children understand scope relations and whether they know which relations are possible for particular syntactic configurations. Subjects were 192…

The project evaluated the effectiveness of using Total Communication (simultaneous use of sign language and speech) with six infants with Down syndrome as a means of fostering communication while verbal skills and articulatory proficiency develop. Each child was seen within the home environment every second week through 24 months of age and once a…

Using a comparative and historical approach, this paper examines linguistic perspectives on minority education, specifically language-based explanations for the reading problems of working class minority group students. The paper first discusses the ways in which competence and performance theories of language treat the relation between language…

A study examined the transition from dependent writing (dictation) to independent writing for 40 first grade students. Specifically, the study investigated (1) how, in terms of common quantitative language units (mean words per t-unit, mean number of dependent clauses, words per maze, mean number of dependent clauses per t-unit, and length in…

This report summarizes the Assessment of Language Proficiency of Bilingual Persons (ALPBP) project research component and provides a summary of the findings of the other six components of the study. The summary of the research component includes an outline of the goals, activities, and requests for proposals. After the introduction, the following…

This study examines effectiveness of preschool and family intervention in prevention of cultural-familial retardation. It attempts to resolve part of the complex of influences on early intellectual development in those born into seriously disadvantaged environments that could account for the increased risk for certain children to be identified as…

Drawing on current research into the learning environment as well as into the reading process and the acquisition of literacy, this book is designed to help elementary and early childhood teachers arrange classroom time environments that encourage children's growth in literacy. Following a brief statement of purpose, the book is divided into the…

A practicum was designed to change the traditional methods of writing instruction which had not been effective in meeting the developmental needs of first-grade children. Twenty-two teachers responded to two surveys to provide problem documentation data. Four goals and instructional plans were selected to address the problem. The first goal, of…

The paper addresses the development of early intervention programs with hearing impaired infants and toddlers and their families. It stresses the importance of working cooperatively with parents, the multidisciplinary approach, appropriate assessment of both child and family, appropriate intervention including monitoring of progress, and…

Six papers on interlanguage are presented. The first, "Language Transfer," experimentally tests Robert Lado's contrastive analysis principles on the transfer of language skills to second language acquisition. The second paper, called "Interlanguage," builds on this work in discussing the structured nature of interlanguage and…

Cosponsored by Hanyang University as a demonstration of its founding philosophy, "love in deed and truth," this conference focused on literacy and languages from cross-cultural and instructional perspectives. The papers selected for this yearbook and their authors are as follows: (1) "Designing Tasks for Slow Learners in L2"…