Drawing from experiences in teaching kindergarten teachers in Saudi Arabia to conduct "sharing time" or "show and tell" sessions, discusses the activity's affective and cognitive value, indicating that teacher and peer feedback promotes language development and the growth of curiosity and inquisitiveness. Makes practical…

Children with specific language impairments (eight learning Italian, eight learning English as a first language) were studied for grammatical deficits. Italian-speakers used noun inflections, verb inflections, copula forms more than English-speaking counterparts, matched by utterance length. Articles were used similarly. Results were consistent…

Depicts the state of two-way immersion programs in the United States. Data indicate that these programs educate nonnative- English-speaking students, expand the nation's language resources by conserving the native-language skills of minority students and developing second-language skills in English-speaking students, and enhance crosscultural…

Reviews research findings in the context of Australian children in the following areas: (1) health and well-being of children in both family and school contexts; (2) early-years classes from children's perspectives; (3) classroom interactions; and (4) quality assurance and best practice as it relates to role of teacher in enhancing child thought…

This article discusses how teachers and parents can help build children's communication skills. Children's language develops in predictable stages. Here, the author outlines these stages. She also gives suggestions to parents on how to help build their communication skills at home. Language learning takes place throughout the classroom. The author…

This study examines the role of curriculum as a vocabulary learning environment by comparing teacher's Large Group Time instruction in two curricula--Creative Curriculum (Dodge, Colker, & Heroman, 2000) and the Doors to Discovery program (2002). Discourse samples were retrieved from the video data of the Large Group Time activity in five Head…

Invaluable for anyone looking to understand young children's thinking, this essential textbook helpfully combines introductions to theories about thinking with observations from real-life practice. The book explores underlying theories behind topics such as: (1) the relationship between nature and nurture; (2) models of cognitive development, with…

Focusing on the preconversational child who has yet to develop a stable or generalized habit of spontaneous conversation, this book presents ECO (Ecological Communication Model), a new intervention model for social and communicative development of developmentally delayed children. The model is based on two perspectives: the literature on the…

A discussion of language acquisition assumes that lexicon plays a central role, and that the principles of conventionality and contrast are also essential. It examines the hypotheses children draw on about possible word meanings and how they map their meanings into forms. This process begins with children's emerging knowledge of conventional words…

Two lines of research are synthesized in this study: (1) structural aspects of children's narrative discourse and (2) the role of maternal styles of talking with young children. Personal narratives of 20 Japanese preschool children, aged 4 and 5 years, and their mothers were analyzed for developmental differences in the 2 age groups. Then…

One of several guides developed by the California Department of Education for caregivers in centers and family child care homes, this guide offers information based on current theory, research, and practice that will support the language development and communication of infants and toddlers and their families. Each of the five sections focuses on…

A longitudinal study called The Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development examined the relationships between the kinds of talk that children experience at home and school at ages 3 and 4 and measures of literate abilities at age 5. Subjects, 87 children in 2 cohorts of 42 and 45 children from low-income families living in the Boston,…

This study investigated patterns of acquisition of English and Japanese by a toddler, aged 16-23 months, living in Japan. The child's mother and father are British and Japanese, respectively. The focus of the study was on early grammatical morpheme and transformational rule acquisition as demonstrated in the child's utterances. The study is…

As human understanding is largely metaphorical, what metaphor is, how children use it, and how they can be taught to use it more effectively are important educational concerns. A direct or indirect comparison between two apparently unlike things, metaphor consists of a topic, a vehicle of comparison, and ground--or traits--linking the topic and…

This study claimed that the ability of bilingual children to solve metalinguistic problems depends upon the demands of a given problem for analysis of knowledge or control of processing. It examined two hypotheses concerning bilingualism and metalinguistic problem-solving: (1) that bilingual children would be more advanced than monolingual…