During the summer of 1968 a special summer program in sociolinguistics ("Language, Society, and the Child") was held at the University of California, Berkeley. This program grew out of the research on "children's language acquisition in a variety of cultures" which has been underway at that institution for four years. Originally it was planned to restrict the program to 32 pre- and post-doctoral students with backgrounds in linguistics and the social sciences. Among these were seven who had recently returned from making field studies, guided by the "Field Manual for Cross-Cultural Study of the Acquisition of Communicative Competence" (ED 015 434). The participants attended four workshops, each restricted to eight participants: one on child grammar, two on sociolinguistics, and one on child phonology. They also took courses in the regular University summer program. It was found, upon opening the workshops to auditors, that the extra participants were one of the factors working against successful analysis of the field data. Some of the important topics which were discussed were the structure of early grammatical constructions, the rules for social uses of language in children's cultures, and the effects of the milieu of the child on the rate and type of language development. The effectiveness of these workshops as training devices is also evaluated in this article. (JD)