The discussion following Roger Shuy's presentation on "The Mismatch of Child Language and School Language" focuses on the value of studying language functions, the problems associated with identifying those language functions and their stages of development, and whether knowledge of such language functions will increase reading teacher…

Insight into processes involved in child bilingualism is provided by this account of the "primary language acquisition" (in the sense of Lamendella, 1977) of two languages, English and Hebrew, by a 4 1/2 year old subject. The child's re-entry into her first language, Hebrew, after a year spent in an all-English environment, is traced. Of central…

A study is presented that considers the narrator's knowledge of conventional schemata for stories and the cognitive factors which seem to be affecting the selection and organization of material for narration. Children ranging in age from 3 years 10 months to 7 years 4 months were asked to watch a video tape cartoon and recount the story to a…

Noting that the idea of reading as a natural language communication process has been well established by research, this paper identifies learning strategies and suggests teaching methods for developing the young child's awareness of the communication nature of reading. The paper concludes that learning strategies based on imitation, drawing, and…

This study investigated the quantitative and qualitative differences in the responses of children aged four, six, and eight to four kinds of questions; cognitive memory, convergent, divergent, and evaluative. The subjects, 48 boys and girls, were from advantaged homes and had attended, or were attending, nursery school. Each subject was shown a…

The purpose of the present study was to compare performance of bilingual and monolingual children on certain language-related skills. Fifteen children between the ages of three years, eight months, and seven years were matched for age and sex in each of the following four groups: middle-class monolinguals, lower-class monolinguals, Spanish-English…

The recent experimental literature on the acquisition of English antonyms is reviewed, with special reference to the position of Eve Clark and the particular ontogenetic assumptions her position entails. The assumptions examined are: (1) in a hierarchically organized lexical domain, the order of acquisition appears to be from the top of the…

The edited transcript of an informal panel discussion about discourse conducted by the Discourse Linguistics Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association is presented in this pamphlet. The transcript also includes comments by the chairperson and by audience members. Among the topics covered in the discussion are the…

This pamphlet is the third in a series of ten stemming from the view that language is central to learning, that teachers can gain insights into their work and into learning by examining the language of the classroom, and that current language theory can be the means to such insights. Specifically, the pamphlet presents ideas drawn from a five-year…

This paper reports on a study of bilingual education (schooling using both English and Spanish as media of instruction) by staff from the University of Texas and 30 bilingual elementary-school teachers from 13 Texas school systems. There was wide agreement on basic principles of bilingual education: that every child should be educated to his full…

The interaction of children and stories is examined in this book, with particular attention to the way in which children's language usage indicates the development of their concept of story. The first two chapters of the book discuss the topic from a broad perspective, seeking a theoretical framework for organizing children's language usage.…

Children use simile and metaphor at an early age in both spontaneous oral language and written language. This study sought (1) to design an instrument to elicit children's spontaneous oral production of simile and metaphor, (2) to elicit such responses and examine the nature of the responses to different tasks and stimuli, (3) and to develop…

The effect of children on adult language has only recently received serious consideration in the fields of linguistics, psychology, education, pediatrics and anthropology, although the importance of parental behavior for the language development of the child is universally recognized. This paper presents a review of the literature on children's…

By age two, a child begins to form complex sentences by joining two or more sentences or by embedding one sentence into another. Formation of conjoined structures is a simpler process and emerges earlier than that of embedding structures. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: (1) Do children produce or understand embedding…

This investigation was designed to examine the acquisition of a set of complex English structures by Egyptian Arabic-speaking adult learners at different levels of proficiency. Two studies were conducted using the methodology of Chomsky as adapted by d'Anglejan and Tucker. In addition, some subjects were asked to translate a number of stimulus…