Discusses the value of rhymes in developing children's concepts of story and pleasure in reading. (HOD)

By age 3, children from privileged families have heard 30 million more words than children from underprivileged families. Longitudinal data on 42 families examined what accounted for enormous differences in rates of vocabulary growth. Children turned out to be like their parents in stature, activity level, vocabulary resources, and language and…

Second, fourth, and sixth graders were given passage of text whose material could be represented as four-level class inclusion hierarchy. Students were asked to construct external representation of passage and answer questions that required them to reason about contents of passage. Quality of representation and performance on question tasks were…

Reviews three studies that focused on ways in which social interactions within the family support literacy acquisition. Suggests that parents' most important contributions to their children's literacy development may come through language interactions, such as storytelling and interactions that foster vocabulary development, rather than through…

This paper discusses how the role of instructors changes as young learners advance along a mastery continuum, or a process of transition from an initial novice to an eventual expert status in the learning of a skill. Four stages along this continuum are: (1) acquisition, in which the learner does not know the task; (2) early consolidation, in…

The connections among language learning, language education, and children's wordplay are explored in this book. Each chapter examines some aspect of the interrelations between wordplay activities and the goals of language education. The book is divided into three sections, with the first section exploring wordplay and language learning in the…

This study reports on ways student under-achievement is being dealt with in the Bilingual Program of Jackson, New Jersey in grades 1-5. The study is limited to students in one school and was carried out during one 12-month period. It focuses on the following issues: (1) teaching methods which are best suited to solve the problems of student…

This study focused on elementary children's shift from syntagmatic to paradigmatic word association and their consistency in responding again with the same word. Subjects, 128 children ranging from first through sixth grade in the Model Laboratory School (Richmond, Kentucky), were presented with 20 structural words and 20 lexical words. The…

Examines the hypothesis that adults and children have media-specific conceptions of picturing and that the functional uses of photography and drawing differ across development. Results showed an age progression from viewing photography as only reflecting the real object to viewing it as a medium that allows for control and alteration of reality.…

Three- to ten-year-olds responded to a three-dimensional object by drawing it and/or verbally describing it. Two days later, they reconstructed the object in drawn or verbal form. Descriptive abilities increased with age. The children displayed differences in verbal and graphic description only when recalling the object from memory. (Author/RM)

If the principles of languages are applied to the learning of arithmetic, it appears that elementary grade pupils are being introduced to mathematical symbols at too early an age. (MP)

Intended to aid schools in designing a Literacy Profile (defined here as consisting of documented information from a variety of assessments of a student's performance over a range of items defined as the dimensions of language learning), this pamphlet presents an alternative to standard assessment techniques. In the form of data tables the…

Discourse and conversational analysis methods were used in a qualitative reconstruction of one aspect of the regularities in the way 61 children "do" personal reference. Of particular interest was the development of two reference forms: minimization--preference for simple (one word) forms, or recipient design--reference forms indicating…