Developed by a speech-language pathologist, this oral language program for students in grades K-2 contains more than 200 field-tested activities designed for whole-class use. Listening and speaking activities are arranged in developmental order and grouped according to the following 12 areas: vocabulary, concepts, listening, giving and following…

The concept of scaffolding can be used as a framework to argue that a "rich interpretation" in child language is needed in the area of early literacy learning. Child language is the reading-like text language of "prereading" kindergarten children. Two threads (internal and external) of the scaffolding process have been identified. The external…

Evidence from a nine-month longitudinal study of deaf children's early attempts at learning to read provides the construct for an instructional model that stresses that even though the children may have, at the least, a meager expressive sign language vocabulary, they can be lead successfully through the holophrastic or one-word stage of reading…

This monograph proposes a theoretical basis for advocating a program of disciplinary arts education as an integral part of general education from kindergarten through grade 12. The theme of the essay is the role that images play in everyday experience and the formation of the educated mind. Images are sensory patterns or patterns produced by the…

In 1985-86, reading was identified as the supplemental instructional area of the Albuquerque (New Mexico) Public Schools (APS) for funding under the Education Consolidation and Improvement Act, Chapter 1. In all, 39 elementary schools, 13 middle schools, and 4 high schools in the APS qualified for Chapter 1 services; 4,317 elementary school…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 15 dissertations abstracted deal with the following topics: (1) the intercultural composition classroom, (2) cross-cultural communication curriculum, (3) miscue analysis with bilingual children, (4) communication difficulties of…

This monograph focuses on the writing development of young English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners in order to provide teachers with an overview of research and theory about ESL children's writing from the perspective that research and theory may and should form practice. Recent research on children's first and second language writing is…

Research conducted since the early 1970s has provided important insights into how written language develops and how teachers can best foster that growth. One of these promotes the holistic approach to language instruction--to nurture the emergent speller is to nurture the emergent reader, writer, speaker, listener, and thinker. Another important…

Designed for secondary school English teachers who want to help their students develop enthusiasm for words, their histories, and the way language structures words to produce meaning, this paper offers suggestions for a program of study employing dictionary projects and personal experience. The paper describes making a class dictionary of teen…

Papers are presented on the loss of language skills by those who have studied and then discontinued the use of a second language. The scope of the papers is summarized and dimensions of language attrition research is briefly discussed. Theoretical aspects of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics with special relevance to language loss are…

Focusing on research about children's acquisition of reading and spelling skills, this paper discusses the larger picture of reading acquisition, issues addressed by research, and results of this research. The paper cites numerous studies on the subject, including studies on whether environmental print experiences enable young children to process…

A coding scheme developed by M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan was used in a study that investigated how students in grades 4, 6, and 8 developed meaning within narrative texts. Students, after being presented with a visual stimulus, were asked to describe what was happening and say what happened before and after the picture. Next, an oral assignment…

The result of an international symposium conducted in Canada, this book contains articles by experts in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, psychology, sociology, and education on the subject of preschool children and literacy. The book is divided into three sections dealing with literacy and culture, learning to be literate, and literacy and…

The past 20 years have seen research on language acquisition in the cognitive sciences grow immensely. The current paper offers a fairly extensive review of this literature, arguing that new cognitive theories and empirical data are perfectly consistent with core predictions a behavior analytic approach makes about language development. The review…

The study examined the relation of language use and logical thought to social experience with both age and class held constant. The primary assumptions under study were: that the logic of symbolic grouping was highly sensitive to a child's experience with the objects to which that logic was applied; that the existence of diglossia in a bilingual…