This is a research report on the acquisition and development of language in children from 4 to 6 years as observed in the pre-elementary grades. The research was done by a number of teams scattered throughout France, and this book is a collection of the papers prepared as a result of their research. The report is divided into five sections. The first section serves as an introduction and gives the objectives and the organization of the report. The second proposes ways of improving the level and structure of verbal communication in the classroom. The third section presents some non-linguistic facets of communication, describes the phonological component of the research and includes a presentation of the phonological system of French. The implementation of certain pedagogical experiments in the teaching of communication is described in the fourth section. The fifth consists of articles dealing with various approaches to the observation of language learning processes, including the sociological/psychosociological approach, the psychological approach, the linguistic approach and the psychopedagogical approach. (TL)