These two studies, which were part of a cross-national project exploring the development of Italian and British children's understanding of sociolinguistic rules, investigated politeness in children's requests addressed to adults and children, and children's views on how requests addressed to persons differing in status and familiarity would be…

This paper describes Directed Activities Related to Text (DART), procedures that were developed and are used in the Reading for Learning Project at the University of Nottingham (England) to enhance learning from texts and that fall into two broad categories: (1) text analysis procedures, which require students to engage in some form of analysis of…

A study examined the importance of two phonological encoding procedures (addressed phonology and assembled phonology) in children who are learning to read and how the relative importance of these two procedures might change over the age range from six to eight. Subjects, 72 fifth, fourth, and third grade students from two inner London (England)…

Studies the effects of two comprehension training methods (one based on imagery and inferencing, the other based on text structure) on various aspects of third and fifth graders' reading performance. Results indicate that neither method had a measurable impact on reading comprehension nor on metacognitive knowledge of the reading process. (RS)

Using Vygotsky's theory of development, explores the significance of storytelling and dramatization activities on the intellectual and emotional development of preschool children. Results indicate that dramatizing of children's stories enhances the storytelling of preschool children and, thus, influences their literacy development. (DST)

This experiment explored relationships between seven to eight-year-old children's reading comprehension skills and inferential and constructive processing, and between verbatim text recall and ability to make inferences. Skilled readers were more successful at answering questions from memory, but less skilled readers' performance on literal…

Purpose: This study explored the effect of frequency (number of presentations), and spacing (period between presentations) on verb learning in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Children learn words more efficiently when presentations are frequent and appropriately spaced, and this study investigated whether children with SLI…

In a study of children's reading processes in English, 261 pupils from a Hong Kong Anglo-Chinese school and from an urban comprehensive school in England were given different versions of a text in English and asked to read it silently in preparation for a memory test sometime in the future. Three weeks later, they were tested on story recall.…

Uses case study data from two British schools for grades 9 through 11 (160 students and 109 students) to show the way in which girls link their mathematics underachievement not to themselves but to the type of mathematics that is commonly taught in the United Kingdom, which they believe denies them access to understanding. (SLD)

This study investigated variables that might be associated with outcome differences in language development of 10 children (ages 10-20 months) with blindness or severe visual impairments, attending a developmental vision clinic in southern England. Subjects' early patterns of expressive language development were examined and related to observed…

There is a growing recognition of the way in which instruction can be enriched by engagement with narrative, and teachers can learn much from studying interactions between parents and children where the activity seems unforced and enjoyable and where parent and child seem most in harmony. Such a pair are three-year-old Anna and her mother, who is…

This book is a survey of all the modern language examinations in the United Kingdom at "GCE"'O' level, Scottish 'O' grade, and "CSE" Mode 1, available in 1979 in French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish, as well as the "16+" examination offered by a consortium of boards in the north of England. It is an attempt…

Using data collected by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), the authors of this study examined the reading achievement of 14-year-old boys in India and England. They sought to determine the factors involved in the academic achievement of these boys in the natural sciences. Factors studied, in addition…

This paper presents and analyzes two examples of classroom discourse which belong to the genre of "talk about texts." Both are extracts from discussions between a small group of primary school students and their teacher (in England) on the topic of short texts of narrative fiction which they have just read together during the…

To develop a new model of the reading process, a longitudinal study investigated the importance of the concepts of cohesion and register (fiction or nonfiction) in the assessment of text readability. Subjects, 436 8-year-olds (Cohort A), 474 10-year-olds (Cohort B), and 445 13-year-olds (Cohort C) from 23 urban and rural British schools--most of…