Differentiation of the effects of cultural deprivation and achievement characteristics as they relate to auditory comprehension and by implication to potential reading ability was investigated. A total of 80 eighth-grade students were classified into four experimental groups: deprived-achievers, deprived-nonachievers, nondeprived-achievers, and…

A child's language development during the elementary school years is described, with emphasis on acquisition and control of structural and lexical dimensions of the language of standard and nonstandard speakers and with special concern for the relationship between language production and the reading process. Numerous research studies are reviewed…

Four researchers discussed their studies of oral reading miscues within a round-table format. After each participant's description of the specific concerns and procedures of his study, the following topics were discussed: description and analysis of the miscue, correction strategy, relationship of the child's language to the language of the…

Bilingual education means that equal emphasis is given to the development of the child's first language and to the learning of English as a second language. The teacher should know exactly where his students are in the development of their first language when they begin to study the second language. This requires a knowledge of the language…

The purpose of the LARC (Language Acquisition Resource Center) project is to implement a home-based program which will help children of ages six months to five years develop communication skills. The program is designed for children of all socioeconomic groups, although it has been set up by the Center for Urban Education (CUE) as a pilot program…

This report describes an investigation of the acquisition by children of a symbolic system, specifically English nomenclature--that set of nouns that serves the function of naming, denoting, or referring to objects. The five studies involve nine experiments dealing with one or another of the aspects of this problem. Two questions guided these…

This is primarily a book for the classroom teacher, although it will also prove useful to parents, child-guidance workers, physicians, and others who are concerned with the development and training of children with speech handicaps. Contents include "Speech Improvement as an Educational Problem,""Recognizing Speech Disabilities,""The Development…

A description of the linguistic characteristics of casual conversations of Los Angeles Negro K-3 school children was recorded outside the classroom in small groups with two to five participants. Analysis of phonological, syntactic, and lexical characteristics discloses considerable variation in the children's speech, exhibiting both a significant…

In 1964, the author proposed a multisensory approach to reading, and reading was seen as a language skill related to the development of verbal symbolic behavior. A closer focus was permitted on the child's learning process, which consists of preverbal learning (perceptually automatized and subconsciously acquired) and conceptual learning (which is…

A model for helping classroom teachers understand and evaluate the growth of children in oral and written compositions is presented. The recommended procedure is centered around T-unit analysis. The following sequence is one possible way the T-unit analysis procedure might be used by an elementary school teacher: (1) Divide all the sentences of a…

The purposes of this study were to determine (1) whether there is a developmental sequence in children's acquisition of metalinguistic abilities and (2) whether the acquisition of these abilities is related to Piagetian operations. Word awareness served as the measure of metalinguistic ability. An attempt was also made to determine whether the…

Photographs and anecdotal narratives tell stories of concept and language learning by six deaf four-year-old children. Through the misfortune of deafness it was possible to study some matters of learning and communication which involve only the language of action. The author also makes observations about the principle of choice as it contributes…

A definition of bilingualism can include speakers of different languages as well as those who speak several dialects or several sub-varieties of dialects in the same language. Most speakers are able to practice code-switching, whether it is from language to language or dialect to dialect, and the processes involved in such a capability may be the…

This paper explores the questions of how and why children learn names for things. The acquisition of reference is set within a broader discussion of linguistic representation, which defines language as a system functioning in a three-way relationship among the individual language user, the world of experience, and the social community. It is…

This book presents some language studies which have been conducted with children from lower socioeconomic and minority groups over the past four years (1972-1976). These and other studies indicate that children who live in poverty can succeed in school and that, when these children do not succeed, it is due more to a failure of the school to…