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THE JOY OF LEARNING BY AARON STERN (N. Miami Beach, FIa.: Renaissance Publishers, 1977.) Aaron Stern is one of those slightly wild generators of ideas whose exuberant presentation may prove initially unsettling to academic readers. Yet, he has succeeded in influencing quite sober researchers in the areas of language and language learning. Theodore Andersson, for instance, credits Stern as a stimulus to his current work in early childhood bilingualism-biliteracy. The Joy ofLearning is, in essence, an attempt to alter the reader's habits of conceptualizing childhood mastery of language and cognitive skills. To be discarded is the notion of the child being "taught" from external sources (parents, teachers). As Stern observes, it is difficult for adults not to perceive themselves as controlling factors, laboriously equipping unformed children with needed skills and information. This teaching model, though, must cede to one of learning, i.e., one that acknowledges the child's inherent disposition to develop the intricate skills of language and of the manipulation of concepts. From this perspective, the child's willingness to achieve mastery and the amount of material he or she can master both appear vastly greater than in the traditional (or, as the case may be, behavioristic) view. While Stern speaks primarily to parents (indeed, speaks as a parent; his daughter is his experimental subject), his assertions have notable implications for educational and language policy. One has only to think of some of the principal objections to bilingualism. Opponents of bilingualism regularly presuppose the child to be a limited, passive receptacle that can only contain X amount of language; trying to teach two languages will automatically occasion a deterioration in the quality of English. In Stern's terms, this is giving the child far too little credit; one must trust the child as learner. It is true that the author does not have a wide sample of subjects and that he favors somewhat splashy expression (the title of an earlier version ofhis work was The Making ofa Genius). Yet, readers should be willing to relax strictly academic criteria in return for insightful assertions that may easily find an empirical application in research and policy formulation. NAOMI LINDSTROM* *NAOMI LINDSTROM is a member of the Spanish and Portuguese Department of the University of Texas at Austin. She has reviewed Eliade's The Forbidden Forest for the Review, and with Don Nilsen is working on a bilingual contrastive dictionary based on the model of componential analysis. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW ...

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