The Meaning Makers: Children Learning Language and Using Language to Learn

The Meaning Makers is a book about children's language, literacy, and learning. Based on the Bristol Study, "Language at Home and at School," which the author directed, it follows the development of a representative sample of children from their first words to the end of their elementary education. It contains many examples of their experience of language, both spoken and written, recorded in naturally occurring contexts in homes and classrooms, and shows the active role that children play in their own learning as they construct both an internal model of the world and a linguistic system for communicating about it.