This study examined the effects of social class background on children's oral language development. The study focused on children's oral vocabulary knowledge because such knowledge provides a good summary of language skills, is easily measured, and is very consequential for later schooling success. Using a large national data set, the study…

This longitudinal study examines the acquisition of subject pronouns in third language (L3) production. Participants were 90 Basque-Spanish bilingual students, learning English as a third language in a formal setting in the Basque Country. All the participants, who had received the same amount of exposure to English, were divided into three groups…

Reports on the third year of a research project to document and evaluate an innovative foreign language in elementary schools (FLES) program in Japanese for Grades K-5. Findings indicate that the children progressed considerably in foreign language proficiency and developed positive attitudes toward language learning. (28 references) (Author/CK)

The primary purpose of this study was the naturalistic assessment of growth in oral English proficiency of Hispanic American limited English proficient (LEP) students in a paired reciprocal learning format. Subjects were fifth-grade students in a summer English-as-a-Second-Language class. Twelve students in a paired learning format and 12 in a…

This guide, designed for regular classroom teachers in whose mainstream classes language-minority children are enrolled, offers background information and suggestions for helping these students become proficient in English reading and writing and for involving them as resources for global and cultural awareness in majority-language classmates. The…

The road to becoming a reader begins the day a child is born and continues through the end of third grade. At that point, a child must read with ease and understanding to take advantage of the learning opportunities in fourth grade and beyond--in school and in life. Learning to read and write starts at home, long before children go to school. Very…

Sixteen papers are presented. Topics covered include language teaching, discourse analysis, code switching, phonetics, language and cultural identity, and descriptive and comparative studies. All presenters were from the Asia-Pacific area of the world. Papers include: "The Baba Malay Lexicon: Hokkien Loanwords in Baba Malay" (Anne…

The growing practice of beginning instruction in a modern foreign language in the elementary school has created a need for many classroom teachers to become oriented to a whole new field of foreign-language teaching methodology and materials. Since teachers tend to think of language instruction in terms of the English-language arts, the language…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has increased the role of assessment in K-12 education. Designed to ensure that all students meet high academic standards, the law currently requires states receiving Title I funds to test all children annually in reading and math in grades 3 through 8 and report student performance disaggregated by poverty,…

This technical report provides data on the extent to which progress monitoring measures explain reading achievement. The four progress monitoring measures discussed are: letter sounding, phonemic segmentation, oral reading fluency, and comprehension given in either oral or written form. These measures were administered to first grade students in…

The authors conducted an experiment during the 2003-2004 school year to determine whether "On Our Way to English" ("OWE"), a product to help elementary students learn to read and speak English, was more effective in a California and a Texas school district than materials already in place. In the California study, 384 English…

The authors were asked to find out whether "On Our Way to English" ("OWE"), a supplementary, text-based product to help elementary school students learn to read and speak English was more effective in a California and a Texas school district than the materials the districts already had in place. They conducted an experiment…