This paper is primarily concerned with Basil Bernstein's sociolinguistic account of school failure. The first section describes some earlier work relevant to his theories. In the second section, Bernstein's sociolinguistic codes thesis is described, and an attempt is made to show that it suffers from the merging of two logically distinct strands…

This document is a collection of nine papers from the 1974 conference on research in English education and reading. Included are "The Role of the National Council of Teachers of English in Educational Research" by Roy O'Donnell, "Response to Literature" by Richard Beach and Charles Cooper, "Research Paradigms for Reading…

Three extrinsic factors were manipulated in a problem-solving task performed by 80 ten-year-old children of I Q 90-110. The factors were: the presence or absence of the name of the concept given in feedback, specific instructions, and whether the child was allowed to verbalize. The task was a modification of Vygotsky's experiment on concept…

Analysis of adult evaluation of children's linguistic output provides a basis for elaboration upon the work of McNeill (1970) and Brown (1970). When limited to the uttered words of a child paired with an utterance spoken at an earlier time, adults cannot judge the relative age of the children making those utterances; in fact, their predictions of…

Studies of bilingual infants are in disagreement as to the point at which the child distinguishes two languages in his linguistic environment. In this paper, data from two classic works by linguist-parents on bilingual infants are compared with data collected from the author's own bilingual daughter. Five types of behavior are described which…

A longitudinal study of language development is being conducted in which ten recordings of spontaneous speech are being made of l28 children at 3-month intervals. Children were stratified with respect to age, sex, birth month, social and educational family background and family occupations. A matrix was constructed for two groups of children, with…

The primary purposes of this study were to investigate the phonetic bases of nonstandard spellings invented by preschool and primary-grade children, to devise appropriate experimental techniques for eliciting judgments of phonetic relationships from young children, to identify the specific characteristics that influence children's categorization…

The primary purpose of this book is to offer suggestions and writing examples for use in teaching children to write poetry. Each of the 15 chapters deals with a particular subject that could be useful in introducing poetry writing to students. The chapters discuss such topics as developing word consciousness in children, writing cinquains and…

This is a preliminary report on the testing of two hypotheses related to the acquisition of Spanish phonemes, namely that in the nasal series, production of the labial is acquired before the dental, followed by the velar; and that the liquid series, containing "l", "r", and trilled "r" (rr) will be the last class of sounds to be acquired. These…

A study was undertaken to determine how much knowledge children have of grammatical systems before they evidence the systems in their spontaneous speech in a productive way. A child aged about two and a half years was examined over several months through elicited imitation causing him to repeat a model sentence immediately after the researcher.…

This paper reports on a study conducted to determine the abilities of children to make optional transformations in sentences conjoined with "and." The subjects were 35 middle-class children between the ages of five and eight, who demonstrated average school achievement, spoke standard American English, and had normal speech and hearing. A…

Language samples of 15 young normal children actively engaged in learning base syntax were compared with samples of 15 linguistically deviant children of a comparable linguistic level. Mean number of morphemes per utterance was used to determine linguistic level. The two groups were matched according to five linguistic levels previously…

This paper reports on a study of two girls about one year of age, part of a longitudinal study of the development of consonants by children learning their first language. Data are compared with a third child whose progress has been previously documented. Phone classes were grouped and phone trees analyzed for each child. A high level of…

This study investigates children's semantic integration of sentence information as a function of instructions (form or substance), test sentence form (verbatim or paraphrased from acquisition story sentences), and story content (spatial or general relationships). After 144 fifth-grade children were presented with twelve short acquisition stories,…

This paper argues that Mexican-American bilinguals are in danger of becoming victims of a double-deficit theory, i.e., they are erroneously considered by some to be deficient in both their languages. An article by Joseph H. Matluck and Betty J. Mace that takes the double-deficit viewpoint is refuted as being damaging to Mexican-American children.…