Presents guidelines to help literacy educators adopt the organic primer approach that has been found to be effective in helping adults learn to read. (HOD)

Discusses word games and activities that encourage students to use dictionaries and alternate forms in their writing. (HTH)

An often-neglected aspect of daily language is syllable doubling or repetition, as in infant language ("nounou"), onomatopoeia ("ronron"), interjections or responses ("oui oui"), names ("Mimi"), or military slang ("coco" for "commandant"). The mechanisms and semantic functions of this phenomenon are outlined, drawing on examples from French…

Article considered the language needs of children and descriptive tasks, which proved to be important measures in revealing specific strengths and immaturities in language power. (Author/RK)

Suggests that with the aid of television children can learn to read at home just as they learn to talk. (RB)

Study reports a technique for analyzing and categorizing certain gross features of the receptive language environment which constitute the primary source material for all of a baby's language learning. (Authors/MB)

A review of recent research findings on how a child develops a vocabulary and acquires the ability to express himself. Bibliography. (RB)

An elementary school English teacher relates her school experiences, both as a child and as a teacher, to explain her attitudes toward teaching writing as communication and not as a corrected/correctable language form. (RL)

Reports research on the communicative behavior of a hearing child whose parents communicated with him, from birth, in both signs and words. The child's expressive ability accelerated in both modalities and this is possibly attributable to the addition of the signed component. (PJM)

Considers language growth of secondary school students in terms of their using language to organize real experiences, their awareness of audience, and their ability to manage language for specific purposes and situations. Provides anecdotes of classroom conditions that promoted such student language growth. (RL)

Argues that achievement gains in literacy in the middle school classroom revolve around the three elements of "dialogic instruction" orchestrated to support "envisionment-building classrooms" centered around substantive and sustained "curricular conversations." Asserts that effective classroom practices that include…

Discusses and proposes the best ways to evaluate foreign language students' readiness for study abroad and the effectiveness of such study, focusing on screening and pre- and posttesting, evaluation of course content, evaluation of cultural perceptions, and problems with evaluating foreign study. (CB)