Science education in the Arab world is conducted in various multilingual contexts. When science is taught in Arabic, diglossia -- the coexistence of the formal language of literacy alongside a local spoken variety -- constitutes a multilingual setting the pedagogical implications of which need to be understood. This study compares teacher--student…

Data derived from the spontaneous speech samples of 64 first grade Negro children (32 from an inner city ghetto and 32 from a racially integrated middle income suburb of the same city) were examined to determine whether the difference in socioeconomic circumstances affected (1) the use of nine structural patterns of English and confusion in the…

An ethnographic study was made of a student-led speech event in an ethnically mixed combined first- and second-grade classroom. In an activity called "Sharing Time," general rules governed appropriate ways of behaving, but no teacher rules governed ways of speaking, topic, or amount of time at talk. Collected over a 5-month period, data…

A pilot study was conducted as part of a larger sociological investigation of small group interaction. Specifically, the study dealt with communication in three first-grade advanced reading groups, each composed of 15 children, and focused on two types of requests: those for action and those for information. Student interactions were audio- and…

This study investigated the relationship between the syntactical language development of first grade children and their socio-ethnic status. From a random selection of 160 first grade children, 19 Caucasians with highly developed language abilities were selected from a high socioeconomic stratum to be compared with 19 Negroes with low language…

The language proficiency of four groups of children, Negro and white, in one southern community, Lafayette Parish, Louisiana, is examined. The goals of this study were threefold: (1) to study the development of language patterns in first grade children from these socioeconomic groups; (2) to determine the effectiveness of the Gloria and David…