Reports on an experiment in which adults were asked to identify the gender of prepubertal children by listening to a tape recording of their voices. Findings link social class and sex stereotypes. (AM)

Analyzes discourse practices in British urban primary schools providing marginal bilingual support to immigrant minority-group students as a means to facilitate their social transition to school and eventual access to an English-medium education. The article describes teaching strategies in two classrooms implementing the bilingual approach.…

Presents the findings of an ethnolinguistic study conducted in northeastern England on children's language behavior during their first term in school. The article combines two theoretical perspectives in an analytical description of this behavior presented in three levels of data analysis. (23 references) (Author/CK)

Reports results from "Characters Online" a telecommunications in education project. Participating college students impersonated characters in children's books in electronic mail communications over the Internet with elementary school students reading the equivalent books. Both groups engaged frequently in informal conversation and rarely used…

Identifies factors, both helpful and obstructive, influencing teachers' transition from basal to a whole-language curriculum. Observations from two first-grade classrooms and interviews with school principals and two classroom teachers (one whole-language veteran and the other in transition into whole language) are evaluated. (GLR)

Analyzes data on the acquisition of German by Italian and Spanish speakers. Findings reveal that children learning a first language and adults learning a second language build up syntactic structure in much the same manner, and propose that the weak continuity approach of language acquisition accounts for all instances of syntactic acquisition.…

Focuses on factors influencing the mastery of a foreign language and one's native tongue. Both the child-mother relationship and the teacher-student relationship greatly influence the desire and propensity of an individual to acquire fluency in the language being taught. To learn to speak signifies a wish to use a language and become immersed in…

Explored the relation between types of peer behavior in young children to children's level of intention understanding. Found level of intention understanding predicted types of overtures made, types of objects offered, monitoring of partner responses, partner compliance, and types of speech acts addressed to partners. (Author/DLH)

Background: Both direct (clinician to child) and indirect (clinician to carer) approaches are currently used in the management of children with language delay, but there is as yet little evidence about their relative effects or resource implications. Aims: This research project compared the Hanen Parent Programme (HPP) in terms of its…

A study investigated the English language acquisition of three native Spanish-speaking children in a bilingual preschool, focusing on the spontaneous use of English when play-acting at being superhero figures from popular children's culture. The occurrence of this voice is contrasted with the children's use of Spanish for other types of play and…

A study investigated factors in Chinese language maintenance among balanced and pseudo-bilinguals who are second-generation Chinese-Americans. Subjects were 12 fifth-grade students in a Chinese-language school; half were balanced bilinguals (proficient in both languages) and half were pseudo-bilinguals (those in whom skills are more developed in…

A discussion of environmental variables in children's language development focuses on the impact on the child of his/her surroundings, and especially the adults (parents and other caregivers) with whom the child interacts. The paper reviews the related literature with attention to the following: the parents' responsibility for child language…

This volume contains working papers on a variety of topics in linguistics. They include: "A View of Phonology from a Cognitive and Functional Perspective" (Joan Bybee); "The Geography of Language Shift: Distance from the Mexican Border and Spanish Language Claiming in the Southwestern United States" (Garland D. Bills, Eduardo…

A study examined young children's emergent reading abilities through analysis of their assisted storybook interactions. Twelve storybooks were read to 41 preschool children during a two-week period preceding interviews. During the interviews, each child was asked to "read" a favorite storybook aloud to a stuffed animal and to the…

A course in child development offered at a British secondary school focused on language development. The primary objective was to sharpen college students' awareness of the language development of children they meet in their everyday lives and children they study during the course. The teacher's role is to extract linguistic theory from the…