Discusses recent research highlighting both the child's growth as a reflective language user and the school's capacity to enhance or hamper that growth. The research is concerned with the need for children eventually to use language in decontextualized ways, without the supporting context of visible or manipulable objects or actions. (HTH)

Records the attempts of a very young child to construct his own understanding of what it means to die and of the social impact of death within his own culture. Includes transcripts in which the child uses narrative to frame his first, tentative ideas about death and responds to literature to further extend his understanding. (JD)

Explores a five-year-old's writing about his liking for spiders to learn about the relationship between children's investigations of the world as information (content) and their use of language to do so. Discusses implications for teachers of children's ability to deal with concepts and vocabulary associated with content materials. (HTH)

Presents conversations of a group of fifth graders collaborating on a social studies task to illustrate how childen use language to learn. Focuses on one student whose oral language was rapid and chaotic but who demonstrated extremely sophisticated and complex structuring of knowledge to understand a particular social studies concept. (HTH)