Prepared as part of a series applying recent research in oral and written communication instruction to classroom practice, this booklet describes several classroom-based studies that have examined children's writing development and synthesizes what they have shown about the process. The first section of the booklet analyzes the term "writing…

A case study detailed the influence of a nine-year-old female sibling on the writing development of her younger brother, from the time he was 18 months old until he was 28 months old. General and significant interactions, such as the boy's oral language milestones and the books the children shared, were recorded in a journal by their mother.…

Intended for parents and teachers who are interested in the approximate level at which their primary school-age children should be writing, this document describes the type of writing children at each age can produce and how they go about producing it. An introduction makes this point and offers a set of writing process terms to describe…

This descriptive study compared language used by teachers and children in Ausubelian and Piagetian preschool programs during small group instruction and related learning activities. Instruction in the Ausubelian program (AP) was based on Ausubel's subsumption theory of learning while that in the Piagetian program (PP) was based on Piaget's theory…

A collection of research reports concerning language issues on Guam includes: "Language Survival, the Ideology of English and Education in Guam" (Robert A. Underwood); "American Policies and Practices Affecting Language Shift on Guam: 1898-1950" (Rosa S. Palomo); "Is Bilingual Education a Friend or Foe of the Indigenous…

This research study explores how sex role identity is related to the learning of communication and socialization processes in a Taiwanese kindergarten. The study hypothesized that undifferentiated baby-style verbal and nonverbal communication patterns are superceded with styles that become increasingly gender-linked, and language is viewed as a…

Early reading should be studied from three perspectives: the function of print, the form of print, and the conventions of print. In so doing, it may be possible to avoid some of the hazards that have plagued the field, such as unsubstantiated assumptions about beginning reading and how it should be taught, erroneous beliefs that maturation plays…

The second of a two-volume report, this document focuses on the study of written language growth and development among 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children. The first section of the report introduces the program of research by examining its methodological and conceptual contexts. The second section provides illustrative and alternative looks at the…

A study examined the development of discourse cohesion in first language acquisition within a functional and cross-linguistic perspective. The analyses focused on how children introduce new referents in discourse across four languages: English, French, German, and Mandarin Chinese. The data base consists of narratives produced by children between…

A study was conducted to determine: (1) whether language-impaired children have deficient paraphrase capabilities; (2) whether these deficiencies are both qualitative and quantitative; and (3) whether these abnormal skills are deterimental to normal linguistic growth. Forty-eight children from grades 1,3,5, and 7, with language impairments for…

The amount of time that should be spent on explicit teaching of language patterns and structure is an issue among second language teachers. Those who believe that language learning is a developmental process feel that there is no sense in teaching grammar and syntax explicitly since the learner can be expected to acquire these skills as he…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 29 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) aspects of the organization of redundancy rules in the lexicon; (2) the adult role in early child language acquisition; (3) semantic categorization,…

The range of meanings of "big" and "little" that mothers and their three children under age two expressed in relatively natural communication situations was studied. Longitudinal data from transcripts of conversations of middle-class mothers and their children were analyzed along with diary records kept by parents of their children's use of size…

Similarities and differences in language acquisition and variations in patterns of language dominance were studied with three four-year-old girls. The ideoqraphic study of child speech involved a monolingual English-speaking child, a monolingual Spanish-speaking child, and a bilingual English-Spanish-speaking child. The following measures were…

A study was conducted in 1972-73 in Berkeley, Rome, Dubrovnik, and Istanbul, in order to examine the differences and similarities in the sequence of the development of locative expressions in English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish. The subjects consisted of 48 two-, three-, and four-year-olds in each field site. Groups of three girls and…