Describes how "book talks" may be used to stimulate children's reading, provides a sample book talk, and lists sample book talk themes and titles. (DD)

Suggests several activities to be used with variants of folk tales to develop an appreciation of folklore in children and sharpen their critical reading skills. (DD)

Provides an alternative version of Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree" which highlights the story's satirical import. (DD)

Describes how Katherine Paterson's "Bridge to Terabithia" demonstrates the importance of language to children. (DD)

Describes a study which found that children generate literature categories like those selected by adult experts. (DD)

Provides a history of Leo Tolstoy's writing of children's literature and a bibliography of children's books containing translations of Tolstoy's stories. (DD)

Cites 15 documents indexed in the ERIC system which deal with racism, sexism, ageism, and other forms of discrimination in children's literature. (DD)

Attacks the theory that there is a hierarchy of language skills wherein the learner starts with the simplest elements and builds to the complex. (DD)

Describes the steps in the natural process through which children use their syntactic, semantic, and phonological systems in learning to read. (DD)

Analyzes two important characteristics of a traditional reading environment: the amount of time the student focuses on written text during the school day, and the degree of continuity or consistency in the reading instruction the student receives. (DD)

Discusses how patterned reading materials may be used in initial reading to help students use their semantic and syntactic knowledge to predict meaning. (DD)

A review of research and theory demonstrates that teachers can learn much about students' cognitive and linguistic skills by exploring their understanding of proverbs. (DD)

Discusses five studies of early reading which suggest that oral language does not necessarily have to precede reading and that if both are learned at the same time they enrich the child's total language base. (DD)

Suggests that certain kinds of writing assignments encourage children to engage in writing at a higher than usual level of syntactic complexity. (DD)

Presents and discusses an Interactional Competency Checklist as an effective approach to the evaluation of children's oral language competence. (DD)