Language research over the past two decades has revealed that language is not something children "acquire," but rather a system they build. A key factor in this linguistic construction is children's interaction with parents or other caregivers. The studies reveal further that children's repeated interactions with books and stories and…

Three recent studies have focused upon prereading children's concepts of written language, what they think words are, and how they understand the concept of a word. These explorations of young children's early attempts to understand and produce writing have important implications for the preschool and primary classroom. R. D. Morris found that…