This essay, the concluding statement of a two-part article begun in the March 1977 issue of "INSIGHTS," presents a case for the creation of a language-rich environment in an intermediate-grade classroom. The essay suggests that children should read a great variety of literary materials rather than reading extensively in textbooks, that there…

The word "grammar" can be defined in at least four different ways: "intuitive grammar," our intuitive sense of sentence structure; "effective grammar," a command of the syntactic resources of the language; "'good' grammar," the use of socially prestigious grammar; and "formal grammar," the systematic study of the structure of the language. Formal…

Selected aspects of early phonological development are described, and eight important characteristics are suggested. It is held that the child plays a highly active, creative role in the acquisition process. The child's early vocables constitute a connecting link between babbling and adult-modeled speech; the child's phonological systems for…

This report describes a study conducted to discover whether children with language delay would respond differently from normal children on two identically itemed tests of knowledge of adjectives and prepositions, one of which using objects as stimuli and the other using pictorial stimuli. It was hypothesized that the test using objects would be…

Patterns which partly resemble the proposed "fronting,""voicing," and "stopping" tendencies exist to a statistically significant degree in David Olmsted's large sample of child speech. Instead of the "voicing" pattern that has been suggested, however, voiced stops seem to be favored word-initially, but voiced fricatives are favored word-finally.…

The purpose of this study was to investigate differences among four oral language elicitation probes used to collect language samples from young children. Ten kindergarten, ten first-grade, and ten second-grade children provided the oral language samples. Each class was divided by sex, and five boys and five girls from each grade were randomly…

This book takes a broad look at children learning to communicate with words, sentences, body language, and touch. It shows how children learn to communicate effectively in everyday situations by selecting the most appropriate communication strategies--the verbal and nonverbal language which they feel are best suited to the situation. Part 1…

The concepts of front, back, and side may be easily understood in relation to an intrinsically fronted item, but with a nonfronted object they depend on situational or psychological cues. A study investigated a child's awareness of the front, back, and side of his own body and of fronted and nonfronted objects. Researchers hypothesized that a…

This bibliography cites bibliographies of works dealing with language learning and teaching, and with English as a foreign or second language. Entries include both American and European publications, most published since 1970. (CLK)

Speech discrimination by 12 children aged about 1 1/2 to 3 1/2 years was tested, using the discrimination learning procedure of Shvachkin's 1948 Russian study. Recent work on the acquisition of syntax and semantics shows an ordered acquisition for linguistic items; this pilot study was to test whether the ability to discriminate between consonants…

This study focuses on the significance of specific maternal language teaching techniques in the early language development of the child. A recording was made of the verbal and nonverbal interactions in 20 mother-child dyads during a one-hour session in the home. The linguistic level for each of the children, who ranged from 1.9 to 5.0 years in…

The Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) Mod 2 Reading Program is planned as a four-year program (K-3) for teaching reading skills to primary-grade children. The materials from the first- and second-year reading programs are designed with the following two goals in mind: to identify sentence structures that are beyond the syntactic capacity of the…

This paper deals with the assessment of children's acquisition of phonological competence. Phonological competence refers to the idealized speaker/hearer's ability to understand the linguistic structure underlying phonetic input/output. Under the Jakobsonian assumption that the learning of phonological opposition follows a regular sequence, an…

To determine teachers' attitudes (and reasons for these attitudes) toward the language of children in their schools, 33 teachers in selected infant and junior schools in England and a similar number in the United States representing a cross-section of schools and geographic areas in the two countries were interviewed. More than 90 percent of the…

Fricatives and affricates in different word positions and initial fricative clusters were elicited from three linguistically deviant children (ages five years, two months to seven years) and one normal child (age two years, nine months) by means of pictures depicting familiar objects. Data from two of the older children and the normal child are…