A collection of 14 articles about bilingual education for Hispanic children emphasizes early childhood education. The articles explore language acquisition and development, the impact of culture on learning, and classroom strategies. Among the topics are discussed are: child bilingualism, code switching, cultural influences on cognitive style,…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 33 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) aphesis in English; (2) the linguistic representation of tone; (3) discourse structure and anaphora in written and conversational English; (4) a tagmemic…

Noting the close relationship among reading, writing, and oral language documented by research, this paper considers studies of early writing development in the context of emergent literacy rather than in the context of work on writing processes and their development. Following a brief review of early studies of emergent literacy that includes…

Suggesting that perhaps teachers have been overlooking the role of drawing in children's communication development by concentrating on the verbal aspects of language, this paper discusses aspects of verbal and graphic language and looks at the interrelationships between these elements in the process of communication. Selected picture stories of a…

This paper discusses the results of a study comparing the language of preschool children from low-income homes to that of their parents as affected by the adult participation in training sessions planned to encourage language development. The study was conducted in three preschools in the Detroit metropolitan area. A total of 96 children from ages…

This document reviews the major trends of thought concerning first and second language acquisition, in an attempt to trace a sequential history to second language teaching methodology today. The contributions of the behaviorist and nativist schools of thought are examined in particular, and two major issues are focused upon: (1) the origins of…

The paper provides a brief discussion of research conducted in child language acquisition at the University of California at Davis in the winter and spring of 1977. The research was directed at children's comprehension of WHY questions. It was an attempt to define when and how children come to understand abstract concepts, such as WHY questions.…

Spontaneous speech performance of ethnically diverse subjects was investigated by measuring within- and between-group lexical interface and by assessing direction of vocabulary overlap. Interview data were collected from 144 elementary school children, comprising equal white, chicano and black subsamples evenly divided among lower and upper…

Based on a five month participant-observation study of two schools, this paper describes the organization and curriculum of English primary schools, with an emphasis upon strategies and materials used in developing linguistic competence in school children. The report describes the organization, curriculum, and development of communication…

A common assumption underlying cross-linquistic studies in child language is that the comparison of any feature in unrelated languages may simplify semantic-grammatical complexities in a way that studies on a single language cannot. This paper begins by discussing the order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes in Spanish by four…

This is one of three volumes of instructional games devised to further the development of childrens' listening, logical thinking, problem solving, and effective oral communication skills. The games are designed to create a relaxed, informal setting in which teachers can encourage and support children's natural speech and provide language…

The narrative performances of Navajo children were examined to determine the ways in which the skills of competently structuring a narrative are informally learned within the peer group. Ten- and eleven-year-old Navajo children, living near Window Rock, Arizona, were evaluated in telling stories about the most traditional figures of Navajo belief,…

Investigators agree that mothers employ a variety of request forms and that children seem to be able to respond to these forms with a remarkable degree of accuracy. It is suggested that the speech of mothers to their children is filled with requests which are really not requests at all. It is shown that many of what appear to be adult requests to…

This investigation studied the performance of fifteen normal and fifteen language-disabled children on experimental pragmatic tasks and on a standardized Piagetian measure of sensorimotor intelligence. The children were matched for mean length of utterance, all subjects performing at the holophrastic level. A series of experimental measures was…

This study proposes that children's phonological behavior at Stage VI of sensorimotor development may show markedly decreased variability compared to children at Stage V. According to Piaget, sensorimotor development during Stage VI is distinguished from preceding stages by the onset of representational ability and ability to form mental…