ABSTRACT
This chapter is a modified version of Chapter 5 of Children Under Five: educational research and evidence (Clark 1988), now out of print. Four British researches are summarized and evaluated to help readers to assess how widely their results can be generalized. The four studies, by Tough, Wells, Tizard and Hughes and Corinne and John Hutt and their colleagues, although they took place in the 1970s, continue to influence our views on the language of young children and of their homes. The research by Tizard and Hughes, as reported in Young Children Learning (Tizard and Hughes 1984), in particular is cited in many textbooks currently used in courses for early years educators; the second edition, which appeared as recently as 2002, still reports the same study. Assumptions about the language of young children prevalent when these studies were undertaken were discussed in Chapter 2.
