The language a child learns from and attends to is the speech of significant persons in his world, addressed to each other and to him. As the child gradually participates in this social interaction he learns communicative competence, i.e., the nonconscious, tacit knowledge that underlies speech behavior--knowledge of both the language and the social world. Every child has communicative competence; what the teacher works toward is communicative adequacy. Concerned about child language and speech as well as educational practice, this book first begins by devoting a chapter to a discussion on language and then giving the next four chapters to syntax, sounds and meanings, developmental processes, and environmental assistance in language development. From there the focus shifts to language differences and language use: dialects and bilingualism, communicative styles, and the roles of language in cognition. The book ends with a chapter reflecting on oral language in education and an appendix which describes methods of analyzing child language from spontaneous speech and tests. (HS)