Purpose: In this mixed-methods study, we address two aims. First, we examine the impact of language variation on the ratings of children's narrative language. Second, we identify participants' ideologies related to narrative language and language variation. Method: Forty adults listened to and rated six Black second-grade children on the quality…

The "wanna" facts are a classic Poverty of Stimulus (PoS) problem: "Wanna" is grammatical in certain contexts ("Who do you want PRO to play with?") but not others ("Who do you want who[strikethrough] to play with you?"). On a standard analysis, "contraction" to "wanna" is blocked by some…

Designed to grade children's knowledge of commonly used instructional terms in a particular language arts program, the AIT consists of a verbal part and a situational part. Each part assesses the same commonly used instructional terms: word, begin, letter, name, makes sense, beginning sounds, print, trace, capital letter, rhyme, period, stands…

Developed as part of the Milieu Language Teaching Project at the John F. Kennedy Center at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, this KIDTALK Behavior-Language Coding Protocol and manual measures behavior occurring during adult-child interactions. The manual is divided into 5 distinct sections: (1) the adult behavior codes describe…

This study, replicating an earlier experimental study, examined language attitudes in New Mexican Hispanic bilinguals aged 10-20, drawing on a socio-educational model of attitude formation and focusing on the relationship between language attitudes and five other variables: age; gender; youth culture; language ability; and language and cultural…

This paper presents a "Language Background Questionnaire" designed for use in gathering information on the home linguistic environment of bilingual children. The questionnaire probes a series of demographic and environmental variables which define a bilingual child's sociolinguistic milieu. Instructions are given for calculating the overall…