Examined 2-year-olds' language acquisition with an emphasis on the agency and intentionality of the child. Concluded that development depends on the child's expression of intentionality by actions (performance), the essential tension between the child's engagement and effort, and the integration of linguistic, cognitive, and social aspects of the…

This book is designed to help second and foreign language teachers understand how languages are learned. Chapter 1 examines several theories on how young children acquire their first language, including behaviorist, innatist, and interactionist models. Chapter 2 presents and analyzes several theories on second language (SL) learning. Chapter 3…

The evolution and activities of the National Languages and Literacy Institute of Australia Limited during its first three years are described. The institute consists of a complex network of activities across Australia, including; a research and policy coordination center in Canberra; nine research and development centers specializing in various…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 15 dissertations abstracted deal with the following topics: (1) the intercultural composition classroom, (2) cross-cultural communication curriculum, (3) miscue analysis with bilingual children, (4) communication difficulties of…

This monograph focuses on the writing development of young English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners in order to provide teachers with an overview of research and theory about ESL children's writing from the perspective that research and theory may and should form practice. Recent research on children's first and second language writing is…

Research conducted since the early 1970s has provided important insights into how written language develops and how teachers can best foster that growth. One of these promotes the holistic approach to language instruction--to nurture the emergent speller is to nurture the emergent reader, writer, speaker, listener, and thinker. Another important…

Papers are presented on the loss of language skills by those who have studied and then discontinued the use of a second language. The scope of the papers is summarized and dimensions of language attrition research is briefly discussed. Theoretical aspects of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics with special relevance to language loss are…

The past 20 years have seen research on language acquisition in the cognitive sciences grow immensely. The current paper offers a fairly extensive review of this literature, arguing that new cognitive theories and empirical data are perfectly consistent with core predictions a behavior analytic approach makes about language development. The review…

The prerequisites of language acquisition are cognitive and pragmatic. The child's conceptual development and social needs direct his attention to particular linguistic forms. These provide an efficient selection device enabling the child to match his language learning task with his abilities. The second language learner who is cognitively and…

The normal sequence of development of Spanish phonology and Spanish grammatical patterns in the speech of native Spanish-speaking children, two to five years old, was studied to determine the syntactic structures and range of language variability at each chronological age level. Middle-class children, living in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of…

Infant bilingualism can be defined as a child being exposed to two or more languages from birth. Because of the dearth of first-hand research on the effect of a bilingual environment on a child's speaking patterns, parents from multilingual backgrounds raised their daughter in a bilingual environment, German and Spanish, in England. They speak to…

In order to examine the emergence of semantic notions and their interaction with the linguistic codes of bilingual children, this paper focuses on acquisition of a semantic field related to Piagetian tasks of conservation. The hypothesis examined in this study states that the manifestation of a concept will occur first in the bilingual's dominant…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 20 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: children's sociolinguistics skills, ability to sequence verbal expressions, analogical abilities, and learning and application of the principle for nouns; Basil…

An introductory statement notes the increased interest in the fields of communication theory, linguistics, and psycholinguistics during the period 1953-57 and suggests reasons for this attention. The body of the article summarizes and comments upon some of the relevant literature published since 1953 in these three interrelated areas, limiting the…

The five papers collected in this booklet present an overall view of language development from the early 1950's to the present. Joshua A. Fishman discusses language and the problems of social and national development and indicates how sociolinguistic research may illuminate these problems. Albert H. Marckwardt considers the teaching of English as…