This issue of the "Indiana English Journal" discusses the teaching of writing and contains suggestions that will help improve students' writing. The essays contained in this monograph include "The Writer as Writer and Critic: How to Be a Schizophrenic and Still Not End Up in Bedlam,""A Teacher's Mini-Glossary of Writing Techniques,""Film--A Way to…

A longitudinal study of language development is being conducted in which ten recordings of spontaneous speech are being made of l28 children at 3-month intervals. Children were stratified with respect to age, sex, birth month, social and educational family background and family occupations. A matrix was constructed for two groups of children, with…

Provided are suggestions for selecting and implementing a sign language system with multiply handicapped deaf children and adults, based on a program at the Stone Belt Center (Bloomington, Indiana). Discussed are reasons for deciding to use sign language with the multiply handicapped deaf, nine different sign language systems, guidelines for…

The primary purposes of this study were to investigate the phonetic bases of nonstandard spellings invented by preschool and primary-grade children, to devise appropriate experimental techniques for eliciting judgments of phonetic relationships from young children, to identify the specific characteristics that influence children's categorization…

The purposes of this study were to compile lists of the words used by kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade children in their oral language and to examine differences in the diversity of the vocabularies among the three grade levels. Twenty-nine kindergarten, 25 first-grade, and 23 second-grade children, all of whom attended schools in…

This article examines several major sociological characteristics of the Caribbean region in a study of pidginization and creolization. Three major conditions which may have affected the ways that Creole languages develop are discussed. They include: (1) the relative proportion of Africans, Europeans, and other groups now present in specific…

Techniques and procedures for teaching reading as a meaning-making, language-oriented process are the focus of this book. The underlying premise is that children are taught to read so that they have an important tool for developing and expanding concepts. In order to accomplish this aim, children must be exposed to the precision and ambiguities of…

The role of the family in the education of a young child, particularly during the first three years of life, is the subject of this symposium address. Four topic areas are identified as the foundation of educational capacity: language development, curiosity, social development, and cognitive intelligence. Professional educators, working directly…

Fifty-two institutionalized mentally handicapped children (average CA of 12 years) were engaged in a study attempting to determine whether there are ordinal dependencies in various scales of developmental milestones or supra-structural behaviors in language, and if so, the degree to which hierarchical levels within given categories serve as…

A three-unit contingency record of the types of mands (instructions, commands, directions, and questions) presented, the classes of response evoked, and the consequent conditions for the responses was used in an observational study of "mand interactions" between supervisors and employees of four groups: nonretarded adolescents living and…

The possible relevance linguistics could have for curriculum development in native language teaching is explored. The discussion focuses on three question: (1) Does the study of linguistic theory in school contribute to the development of the students' language competence? (2) Is the study of language a subject worth teaching? (3) Can linguistic…

This is a preliminary report on the testing of two hypotheses related to the acquisition of Spanish phonemes, namely that in the nasal series, production of the labial is acquired before the dental, followed by the velar; and that the liquid series, containing "l", "r", and trilled "r" (rr) will be the last class of sounds to be acquired. These…

A study was undertaken to determine how much knowledge children have of grammatical systems before they evidence the systems in their spontaneous speech in a productive way. A child aged about two and a half years was examined over several months through elicited imitation causing him to repeat a model sentence immediately after the researcher.…

This paper reports on a study conducted to determine the abilities of children to make optional transformations in sentences conjoined with "and." The subjects were 35 middle-class children between the ages of five and eight, who demonstrated average school achievement, spoke standard American English, and had normal speech and hearing. A…

Language samples of 15 young normal children actively engaged in learning base syntax were compared with samples of 15 linguistically deviant children of a comparable linguistic level. Mean number of morphemes per utterance was used to determine linguistic level. The two groups were matched according to five linguistic levels previously…