Focuses on two major applications of authentic materials: developing learners' language skills and orienting learners to the application of these skills in possible subsequent activities in the outside world. The article describes experiences in selecting and using authentic materials and in designing and evaluating tasks illustrating such…

Distinguishes between text authenticity and learner authenticity. A set of guiding principles for making textually authentic materials learner authentic is suggested. A 3-week supplementary English program, which was devised for a group of Hong Kong Polytechnic students based on these principles, is described. (12 references) (Author/CK)

Considers the benefits of extensive reading, examines some of the reasons for its failure to take off, describes two programs, and offers teachers some leading questions to help them develop their own programs. (three references) (Author/CK)

Explains why teachers might feel uneasy about the apparent lessening of their crucial position at the front of the class when a learner-centered model is used. Attempts to show how teacher ego is not incompatible with different teacher roles; acceptance of a predilection for performance may be the first stage in a richer description of teacher…

Reports on two studies that looked at the spontaneous face-to-face interaction of three-month-old infants with their mothers. Facial and manual actions, gaze direction, and vocalizations were coded. Results showed a correlation between index-finger extensions and syllabic sounds, suggesting a strong connection between speech and the pointing…

This study explored the development of verbal behaviors of infants during two mother-infant games. The verbal behaviors produced during games were compared with the results of language tests administered during experimental sessions. Strong correlations were found between the results of these two measures of language. (JL)

This study examined adult and child word-initial voice onset time productions in English and Hindi to determine the age of acquisition of the phonemic voice contrast. Cross-linguistic differences in patterns of acquisition were found, but these were not necessarily traced to the different phonological systems. (JL)

This study compared the performance of English-speaking children attending French schools (bilingual group) on phonological awareness tests with same age English-speaking children attending English schools. Results of the study are interpreted to reflect the role of second-language input in phonological awareness. (JL)

In this longitudinal study, changes in parental labelling and infants' categorization skills were examined as potential predictors of vocabulary acquisition, the age of the naming explosion, and the acquisition of subordinate labels. Findings suggest that the influence of each factor varies as a function of the stage and aspect of lexical…

This study tests the widely cited claim that young simultaneous bilingual children reject cross-language synonyms in their earliest lexicons. First, the accuracy of the claim is examined, and then its adequacy as support for the argument that bilingual children do not have independent lexical systems in each language is considered. (JL)

Bilingual case study of infant acquiring Spanish and English from birth to 1;10 is used to address whether young bilinguals differentiate between their languages based on language choice. Daily diary records and weekly video recordings in the two language contexts were used to construct the child's lexicon and establish that translation…

Two studies are described that investigated preschool children's sensitivity to relative clauses as barriers to the movement of "wh" questions. A cross-sectional study and a longitudinal study conducted over the course of one year found that young children refused to extract "wh" questions from the ungrammatical site inside a relative clause. (JL)

The study reported here investigated the effects of using props to illustrate the meaning of sentences in a syntactic awareness task in which subjects were required to correct ungrammatical sentences. Children scored significantly higher in the props condition though the proportion of meaning-changing errors to total errors was not significantly…

Conversations between mothers and children in Japanese and North American cultures were conducted to account for the way in which cultural narrative style is transmitted to children. The contrasts yielded from the study are described. (JL)

Presents a quantitative study of children's noun plural overregularizations on recent comparisons of connectionist and symbolic models of language. The speech of 10 English-speaking children aged 1;3 to 5;2 were analyzed. Results pose challenges to connectionist models, but are consistent with the blocking-and-retrieval-failure model in which…