This study is a modest attempt to use three Korean primary school children and their English diaries as go-betweens to mediate in an apparent dispute between the founding fathers of socio-cultural theory about the nature of language and language awareness. According to Bruner, Vygotsky holds that mediation by others and self-mediation of written…

In order to investigate relationships between spoken and written language knowledge at a phonological level, linguistic theories of syllable structure that treat initial consonant clusters as units are first discussed. Second, experimental evidence is presented suggesting that analysis of initial clusters is difficult for both children and adults…

This book is for boys and girls who know the numbers from one to thirty thoroughly, who can count to one thousand, who know something of the multiplication tables of two, three, four, five, six, ten, and twelve, and who understand the simplest facts about fractions. This book is both to be read and to be studied. It calls for oral recitation and…

Discusses the topic-based approach for primary classroom curriculum. Focuses on the appropriateness of the approach for the acquisition of language and literary skills by children with learning difficulties. (RJC)

This study examines how the language used at home, Putonghua or Cantonese, has influenced the Chinese reading attainment of 4335 primary school students in Hong Kong. Also examined was the influence of the birthplace and home background socioeconomic status (SES) of the reader. Although the indigenous Hong Kong population uses Cantonese, a dialect…

This study examined whether oral reading fluency in a child's first language (Spanish) as assessed by Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) was related to oral reading fluency in a second language (English) and whether Spanish oral reading fluency probes administered in the fall were predictive of English oral reading fluency outcomes for spring of…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of DISCOVER, a performance-based assessment, in identifying gifted students in Lebanon. DISCOVER is grounded in Gardner's MI theory and consists of tasks involving problem-solving and creative abilities. The sample consisted of 49 middle-class 5-th graders, with a mean age of 10.2…

Hypothesizes that young children respond incorrectly in interpreting ambiguous communications in referential tasks because they respond to the elocutionary performative force rather than the locutionary content of the communications. Results of two experiments tended to confirm the hypothesis. (Author/RH)

Using a corpus of 18 child-adult conversations, this study distinguished adult utterances that solicited information from those soliciting acknowledgment (i.e., where the response was predictable, and the utterance served a predominantly social function). Both types of utterance were usually responded to by children, but the form of response…

This article presents a story of Han, a Vietnamese kindergartner, during her first year at East Elementary School. A classroom environment that supports learner-generated inquiries gives her the self-confidence to inquire freely into a second language and culture. Her inquiries enable her to develop her oral and written English language as she…

Notes that research and clinical studies have identified many relationships between various oral language processes and written language. Provides overview of findings regarding auditory receptive and expressive language processes, including phonemic discrimination, linguistic awareness, listening comprehension, word retrieval, syntax,…

This article reports some outcomes from an exploratory study that compares children diagnosed with ADHD and without language impairment with typically developing children for aspects of language use. Discourse analysis based on a systemic functional linguistics approach is applied to spoken and written samples from three different text types that…

Development of English- and Spanish-reading skills was explored in a sample of 251 Spanish-speaking English-language learners from kindergarten through Grade 2. Word identification and reading comprehension developed at a normal rate based on monolingual norms for Spanish- and English-speaking children, but English oral language lagged…

Reference profiles for characterizing the language abilities of elementary-grade African American students are important for assessment and instructional planning. H. K. Craig and J. A. Washington (2002) reported performance for 100 typically developing preschoolers and kindergartners on 5 traditional language measures: mean length of…

A group of 21 hard-of-hearing and deaf children attending primary school were trained by their teachers on the production of selected consonants and on the meanings of selected words. Speech production, vocabulary knowledge, reading aloud, and speech perception measures were obtained before and after each type of training. The speech production…