Discusses the results of an examination of the scripts used in eight television programs popular with teenagers that indicate that viewers are exposed to short, simple sentences and largely unsophisticated language structures. (AEA)

Discusses various sociological issues of bilingual education, including language and ethnicity, language planning, nonstandard versus standard, and language maintenance. Types of bilingual education are described. (EKN)

Normal, first-born children of two-parent, self-supporting families (N=60) were divided into three groups at birth: control, mothers receiving a specific language stimulation program, and both parents receiving the program simultaneously. Infants whose parents received simultaneous training exhibited the greatest gain over 4 1/2 months in Bayley…

A longitudinal study examined two-year-olds' acquisition of the English auxiliary system after a six-week exposure to additional auxiliary input in varying sentence contexts. Results indicated that subjects did not significantly differ from a baseline group that did not receive additional input. (Author/CB)

Elementary and secondary students (N=150) were given a forced-choice task of idiom understanding. Performance on tasks steadily improved with age, and idioms with higher familiarity and transparency were easier for students to understand. Results support the language experience model of figurative language development and the hypothesis that…

Study of advanced English learners' development of active vocabulary found that the need for greater vocabulary influenced subjects with sufficient communicative competence and no explicit vocabulary instruction to enrich their lexicon. (34 references) (CB)

Describes attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of the video-based grammar instruction course "French in Action," concluding that the material appears to be successful for intermediate learners, although caution is made about the evaluation's applicability to other populations of students. (nine references) (CB)

In a series of 5 experiments, we investigated whether the processing of phonologically assimilated utterances is influenced by language learning. Previous experiments had shown that phonological assimilations, such as /lean#bacon/ [right arrow] [leam bacon], are compensated for in perception. In this article, we investigated whether compensation…

This study examined the presence of specific story elements and story cohesiveness in child narratives. A sample of 35 Hawaiian children who attended a preschool that emphasized early literacy activities was compared with a control sample. Children first constructed a story from a set of five pictures with adult support, and then retold the story…

Results suggest that the mother-infant-sibling interactive context differs in important ways from the mother-infant dyadic context. The mother-infant-sibling interactive context is a richer language learning environment than previously supposed. (GLR)

Children who are deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) are particularly vulnerable for later reading problems. This article describes the use of experience books, associated with the Language Experience Approach (LEA), as a motivating and linguistically appropriate literacy tool for young children who are DHH. The authors explain how remediation…

Some Grade 4 educators have expressed feelings of ineptitude regarding the support of ESL (English Second Language) learners with limited English proficiency as they do not know how to support these learners effectively. Their litany emphasises ESL educators' need for supportive and preventive intervention. A story-based Language Enrichment…

This study examines the process of Japanese language maintenance or shift among children who were exposed to Japanese and English through the "one parent-one language" approach in Melbourne. The aim was to identify factors that correlate with successful and unsuccessful cases of Japanese language maintenance of such children. The data…

Reports research on the communicative behavior of a hearing child whose parents communicated with him, from birth, in both signs and words. The child's expressive ability accelerated in both modalities and this is possibly attributable to the addition of the signed component. (PJM)

Multiple regression analysis of data regarding college students' oral proficiency in using the present subjunctive after residence in a Spanish-speaking country found a significant positive relationship between length of residence and subjunctive proficiency, and a nonstatistically significant positive relationship between formal study and…