High/Scope's approach to education is a blend of Jean Piaget's constructivist theory of child development and the best of traditional teacher experience. The High/Scope approach is about helping students gain knowledge and skills in important content areas, such as language and literacy, initiative and social relations, movement, music, and…

The historical development of written Japanese has resulted in an extremely complex system. Modern Japanese is usually written in logosyllabic script consisting of a combination of "kanji," the Chinese characters, and "kana," the Japanese syllables originally formed from them. There are two types of "kana," the…

One of the difficulties secondary non-Chinese-speaking background (NCSB) learners are facing is to remember the characters learned in order to recall them when necessary. The traditional way of teaching secondary NCSB learners to remember Chinese characters is through mere repetition, e.g. writing out each single character by following its stroke…

This paper focuses on an information gap task that was part of a larger critical action research project that sought to expand talk opportunities for children in multilingual classrooms. Little of the previous research on tasks and language learning has focused on children learning English as an additional language in the context of diverse,…

This study has been done to gather data as to whether there is improvement in vocabulary development, reading comprehension and reading fluency when a child is reading aloud and he or she has a reading companion as opposed to not having a reading companion. As this literature review indicates there has been a lot of research on the benefits of…

This article reports some outcomes from an exploratory study that compares children diagnosed with ADHD and without language impairment with typically developing children for aspects of language use. Discourse analysis based on a systemic functional linguistics approach is applied to spoken and written samples from three different text types that…

This study tested four complementary hypotheses to characterize intrinsic and extrinsic influences on the order with which preschool children learn the names of individual alphabet letters. The hypotheses included: (a) "own-name advantage," which states that children learn those letters earlier which occur in their own names, (b) the…

Besides phonotactic principles, orthographies entail graphotactic rules for which the reader must convert a phonological representation on the basis of spelling adaptation rules. In the present study, the learnability of such rules will be investigated with reference to Dutch. Although Dutch orthography can be considered highly regular, there are…

Written words are laid out in space and exist on the page all at once, but a reader can only read a few words at a time. For readers, written words are trapped in the medium of time. So how can we best organize writing for readers? Traditional techniques of organization tend to stress the arrangement of parts in space and certain metadiscoursal…

This report summarizes the results of three studies concerning the Reading Recovery or Descubriendo la Lectura program with first-grade California students. Studies were conducted using state-wide data obtained during 1993-94 programs to determine if the program was an effective intervention for children with difficulty in learning to read. The…

Four areas of consideration are crucial to the development of an effective English-as-a-Second-Language writing program: the nature of basic writers; acquisition of written language; approaches to teaching basic writing; and classroom strategies. Basic writers are students who have studied writing for years but are still unable to produce…

This paper considers the relationship between the "context of a situation" and the "metaphorically construed" reality within the transitivity paradigm of Systemic Functional Grammar. The research employed the transitivity model advanced by K. Davidse (1992) to examine the discourse of Japanese wartime (World War II) reporting…

In this Canadian college study, 22 Japanese, English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners' translation processes and writings were examined and contrasted with the same group's first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) writing performance. All subjects (aged 19-23 years) had been educated in Japan in Japanese prior to attending English-language…

Reading is construed as operating within the dynamics of the relationship of reader, text, context, and language system. Context is understood as the cultural and situational environment of the text, itself a semantic unit that is an instance of the language system. A related variable for reading is the awareness of the reader of the language…

This report summarizes two studies which documented the development of prelingually deaf children (N=4, N=40) in Sweden exposed to sign communication during preschool years. The first study involved analysis of video recordings, forming a qualitative description of social strategies used by four children with different social positions in the peer…