Suggests that parents who understand how written language development resembles oral language development are more willing to accept whole language instruction. Offers teachers suggestions on how to convince parents of this similarity. (ARH)

Describes the high Italian speech variety commonly used by Italian Americans, based on a study of 39 Italian Americans that included interviews and questionnaires. Dialectal characteristics, convergence with English, and language maintenance and language shift in the Italian-American community are discussed. (CB)

Although exophoric reference is crucial to appreciating the role of context in spoken language (both to the speaker in producing meaning and to the listener in determining meaning), analysis of eight beginning German textbooks revealed that only two provided all three types (directional, pronominal, and definite article) of such reference. (CB)

Describes several experiments which examined the basic claims of metrical phonology. The first two experiments examined the possible influences of stress clash in speech timing. The third and fourth experiments tested Hayes's (1984) analysis rule of quadrisyllabic meter; the fifth experiment included a basic test of the stress clash notion. (SED)

Reveals that in the average number of words per T-unit, the complexity of basal reader passages generally exceeds that of children's oral language, and that none of the basal series studied exhibited a graduated increase in average number of words per T-unit among passages in the same reader. (FL)

Explores the surface structure observed in Japanese and English spontaneous oral narratives from the perspective of subject and theme. Although both the Japanese and the English narratives employ participant identification as a major cohesive ingredient, how referring forms are used and how they contribute to discourse organization differ. (SED)

Shows how retelling stories appears to be a strategy to improve comprehension, concept of story and oral language. (EL)

Responds to an article appearing in an earlier issue of the journal that discussed the relationship between social-cognitive ability and writing skill. Reports on a study that investigated the relationship and found that social cognitive ability was more closely related to oral than to written performance. (FL)

Describes a study which sought to determine the developmental stage at which children begin to differentiate specific and neutral contingent queries. The study manipulated the familiarity of the adult listener by having each of the 22 children interact both with the mother and with an unfamiliar adult experimenter. (SED)

Describes the InQuest Procedure, which actively involves the reader or listener with narrative text through a combination of student questioning and spontaneous drama techniques. (FL)

It is suggested that native speakers understand that narrative in literature is a form of transcript of full discourse, and students of English can learn the same clues of transaction and interaction in texts through exercises in plot analysis, plot mutation, and scenario derivation. (MSE)

Focuses on (1) the disparities between reading and writing instructional methodologies, (2) the misconceptions students seem to draw if these disparities are not brought to their attention, and (3) the recursive relationship between written and oral language. Contrasts the relationships between main ideas and details in reading processes with…

Three levels of metacommunication knowledge and five factors that influence the understanding of speaker meaning in oral language were identified in pilot interviews with children and adolescents. (HOD)

Focuses on the narrative function to show how children can build on another speaker's turns in conversation and can build on their own utterances as they speak. Analyzes children's dialogs and narratives to highlight the primacy of the oral language arts as they are enacted in daily conversation and play. (HTH)

Describes two experiments that investigate the relationship between beginning readers' concept of word in text and their awareness of phonemes in spoken words. (HOD)