This research reviews literature relevant to the acquisition of language by children. The contemporary rage in the teaching and learning of language is the whole-language approach (Levine, 1994, pp. 38-43). The whole-language approach exposes children to interesting reading and writing at the expense of systematically teaching specific reading and writing skills. Whole-language teachers, for instance, encourage young students to recite along with them as the teachers read aloud from entertaining big-print books. One of the central tenets of the whole-language approach is that language should be learned from whole to part, with word-recognition skills being picked up by the child in the context of actual reading, writing, and immersion in a print-rich classroom (Bates, Bretherton, & Snyder, 1988, pp…