Highlights children as a source of information about curriculum development. Observes how and why some first grade children write, and how this may affect teachers' instructional assumptions. (HTH)

Discusses factors that foster the development of young voluntary readers. Reviews studies that describe home and school characteristics that encourage voluntary reading and stresses the importance of providing young students with a rich literary environment in the classroom. (FL)

Discusses recent research in the development of spelling, the development of spelling ability, and invented spelling and the child's voice. (DF)

Discusses and criticizes the monolingual view of bilingualism, which holds that the bilingual is two monolinguals in one person. Proposes, instead, a view which holds that a bilingual has a unique, specific linguistic configuration. Examines a number of areas in bilingual research that are affected by this different view. (SED)

South American educator and author Freire discusses qualities important for the teacher, his vision of education and the growth of young children, and the role of language and reading in that vision. (HTH)

Discusses what a spontaneously formed group of three children thought and did as they composed a story together. The observations focus on the whole writing process. (HTH)

Explored young children's ability to contrast social roles through language, using a technique of controlled improvisation with puppets. Found that from an early age (three or four years) children are aware of a broad range of social variation and are sensitive to the linguistic means of encoding this variation. (PD)

Concludes that sound awareness scores significantly predicated performance of kindergarten children on a sight-word learning task and a decoding-like task. Subjects' knowledge of terminology was unrelated to success on either task. (FL)

Examines a multicontextual aspect of language proficiency that sociolinguists refer to as "communicative competence." Offers a procedure for its application. (PD)

Results of a study of sound system acquisition of five-year-old students of English-as-a-second-language show that first- and second-language learners exhibit similar but not identical simplification processes, and that evidence for a common developmental sequence in acquisition of consonant sounds was limited. (MSE)

Criticizes the proposed revisions in Manitoba's senior high school English curriculum for their emphasis on language development as a series of skills to be acquired rather than as an exciting means of exploring the world. (MM)

Argues that by encouraging children in their early writing efforts, adults can help them develop into confident and comfortable writers. (FL)

Second language (L2) learning has much more in common with L1 acquisition than has been traditionally acknowledged. New ideas about the nature of language, how it is learned, and how it is used must be taken into consideration when planning foreign language programs. (Author/CFM)

This paper attempts to demonstrate that: (a) syntax is dependent on factors of cognitive and non-cognitive meaning; and (b) criteria for linguistic competence can only be fully met when full command of cognitive and non-cognitive meaning is present. Results have implications for future models of language and language acquisition. (CHK)

A study examined children's use of private speech in early childhood classrooms. The study's three goals were: to determine the degree to which private speech is used; to replicate and extend previous research with older children; and to examine the classroom's particular contexts and activity settings which maximize children's use of private…