This study examines the writing of six first grade children (three girls and three boys of varying abilities) in a "whole language" classroom where writing was modelled daily during "Morning News" and "writing skills" were taught in context. Conducted from a socio-psycholinguistic/emergent writing perspective, this study addresses two major questions: (1) What are the functions and forms of writing in first grade? (2) In what ways do these functions and forms change throughout the first-grade year? All of the children's writing produced during "Writing Workshop" time was analyzed to determine writing functions, structure (genres, structures of text, syntax and sentence patterns), and orthography (segmentation, punctuation marks, capitalization, and spelling). Interrelationships between function and the various levels of form were examined, as were changes throughout the school year. Analytical categories were developed from previous studies and from the data. Evidence was found to support the following conclusions: (1) First grade children write for a variety of purposes. Changes in function appear to be due to children's interests and preferences rather than to their development. There is a trend towards multifunctionalism in first grade writing. (2) Children compose written discourses from the beginning of first grade. (3) Discourse-level structure increases in both variety and complexity from beginning to end of first grade. (4) Segmentation increases in conventionality, with sentence segmentation becoming conventional before word segmentation. (5) Punctuation, capitalization, phonemic segmentation and representation, and spelling become increasingly conventional. (6) Discourse- and sentence-level forms "follow" function, but orthography does not. Changes in orthography are due to development and writing experience. (7) In a comparison of texts produced by children considered by the teacher at the beginning of the year to be "advanced" in development to those of children considered to be "average" or "delayed" in development, at the end of first grade, "advanced" children: (1) write in more complex genres, with more complex text structures; (2) use a greater variety of sentence patterns and punctuation marks; (3) write more conventionally in terms of segmentation, punctuation marks, capitalization and spelling. Thus, the study provides insight into how children develop as writers and the relationship between functions and various aspects of the development of form. / Graduate

This dissertation focuses on Grade 1 children's inquiry of narrative text over a three-month period. The children were read to as a group by the classroom teacher and individually by Grade 7 students, a grandparent helper, and a peer. They also read to themselves. There were ten subjects for the group context and six subjects for each other context. The data consist of audio-tapes and field notes from the five contexts. In addition three interviews were conducted with the classroom teacher and a think-aloud procedure was carried out with six of the subjects at the conclusion of the study. The children's statements were analyzed to determine if they inquired about narrative text and to explore the nature of their inquiry. The teacher interviews were analyzed to discover the teacher's perception of her role in the children's inquiry. The results from the think-aloud procedure were compared with results from the group context to determine if the findings were similar. A definition, description and list of skills of inquiry in the language arts was developed and applied to the children's statements to identify the statements that represented inquiry. Six categories that could be used to describe the nature of the children's inquiry statements emerged from the data. Each of these categories was made up of a variety of more specific classes. The children made more inquiry statements in the group context than in any other context. There were individual differences in the degree to which the children inquired about narrative text, and the text, the teacher's actions and the social context influenced the children's inquiry. The children used a variety of cognitive processes to inquire about text. The children's inquiry statements were evoked by the text, the children and the teacher. The focus of the children's inquiry statements was knowledge not explicitly evident in the text. Their statements took a variety of forms, and declaratives, not questions, were the predominant form. Although they inquired about a variety of subject matter, actions of characters and cause/effect relationships was the content of the majority of their inquiry statements. The function of most of their inquiry statements was the transmission of propositional knowledge and explanations. This study contributes to the existing literature in several ways. First, it provides a framework for considering children's inquiry and their involvement in learning. Second, it illuminates the relationship between the child, the text and the context in children's interactions with narrative text. Third, it reveals the complex and idiosyncratic nature of children's inquiry of narrative text. / Graduate

The problem of this study is to compare the constancy of inter-personal relationships in the first grade of the elementary school and the last grade of the elementary school, the sixth grade.

The purpose of the study is to approach the problem from a practical and workable angle in determining which definite and significant influences have been of benefit to the first-grade pupils of Sherman, Texas, in preparing them for reading readiness.

In 2 experiments, I studied the effects of the establishment of Incidental Bidirectional Naming (Inc. BiN) for unfamiliar stimuli on reading comprehension for first-grade students. In Experiment 1, I measured the associations, differences, and predictive value between multiple measures of reading comprehension and Inc. BiN stimulus control in 22 first-grade students. Inc. BiN stimulus control was measured with familiar and unfamiliar stimuli and partitioned into groups according to degrees of Unidirectional Naming (UniN) and Inc. BiN. Measures of reading comprehension included the i-Ready® K-12 Adaptive Reading Diagnostic and Woodcock-Johnson® Tests of Achievement (WJIV®). Results indicated significant correlations between degrees of UniN for unfamiliar stimuli and reading comprehension. In Experiment 2, I studied the effects of the establishment of Inc. BiN for unfamiliar stimuli on multiple measures of reading comprehension in a single case, multiple probe design across dyads. I selected 3 dyads of first graders who textually responded at or above grade-level and demonstrated the absence of Inc. BiN stimulus control for unfamiliar stimuli. There were 3 reading comprehension measures: (1) explicit reading comprehension probe after reading a fiction and nonfiction passage, (2) read-do probe consisting of unfamiliar stimuli, and (3) WJIV® subtests. Participants acquired Inc. BiN stimulus control for unfamiliar stimuli through a Multiple Exemplar Instruction (MEI) intervention across listener and speaker responses. After participants demonstrated Inc. BiN stimulus control by emitting at least 80% accuracy across listener and speaker response topographies across two consecutive novel stimuli sets, I assessed reading comprehension performance. Results from experimenter-derived passage comprehension probes demonstrated increases across all 6 participants. Although read-do results were inconsistent, 5 participants demonstrated increases following the acquisition of Inc. BiN stimulus control. WJIV® results demonstrated the greatest increases in Passage Comprehension performance, while marginal and educationally significant increases were still observed across Reading Vocabulary and Reading Recall subtests.

No description available.

This study undertook to present and evaluate the ways in which the social needs of the first-grade child are being met by teachers in North Texas. Based on the data presented in the study, eleven definite conclusions have been drawn.

No description available.

This study examines the relationship between whether the level of independence a first-grade age child was permitted at home influenced his social behavior at school.

The problem of the study was to analyze the first-grade reading program of the elementary school of Ferris, Texas, in relation to the recognized plans for progress in first-grade reading.