Monday, February 27, 2017

Vocabulary Development: Part 2Ae


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From Dialogue About Language, Literacy and Learning
03APR2014Leave a comment
Part 2A

We have a long history of research that tells us that children who enter Kindergarten behind their peers in language skills, particularly vocabulary skills, will be at a great educational disadvantage and often will not catch up for many years, if at all. This is still another indicator that “We can’t wait” until 3rd grade to decide that children are behind and need to catch up.

 One of the first studies on the “achievement gap” that I read has had a great influence on my work and teaching of courses in “Language and Learning” and “Reading Comprehension”. In 1976 NCTE published a monograph titled Language Development, Kindergarten through Grade Twelve by Walter Loban. Loban reported on a study where Loban (and his team) followed a group of 211 students who differed in sex, ethnic background, socioeconomic status and spread of intellectual abilities. Data were provided on 3 subgroups of children described as high functioning, low functioning, and mixed (high and low functioning) based on a range of listening, speaking, reading and writing measures along with teacher ratings every year of the amount of language, quality of vocabulary, skill in communication, organization, purpose and control of language, wealth of ideas, and quality of listening. Loban’s most telling finding was that “those superior in oral language in kindergarten and grade one before they learned to read and write are the very ones who excel in reading and writing by the time they are in grade six.

 A second influential group of studies looked at vocabulary specifically and the differences in achievement, even at the preschool level.
The Hart and Risley Study (The Matthew Effect)
The Thirty Million Word Gap
“In this ground breaking study, Betty Hart and Todd Risley entered the homes of 42 families from various socio-economic backgrounds to assess the ways in which daily exchanges between a parent and child shape language and vocabulary development. Their findings were unprecedented, with extraordinary disparities between the sheer number of words spoken as well as the types of messages conveyed. After four years these differences in parent-child interactions produced significant discrepancies in not only children’s knowledge, but also their skills and experiences with children from high-income families being exposed to 30 million more words than children from families on welfare. Follow-up studies showed that these differences in language and interaction experiences have lasting effects on a child’s performance later in life.”

See other resources from the Rice center for education: the OWL Lab in Action (Videos) (Oral and Written Language Laboratory for preK students)

Monday, February 20, 2017

Vocabulary and Early Literacy

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 To understand early literacy development, I focus next on words. Children need to be able to identify/decode words.  They also need to know the meaning of the words they read. Vocabulary knowledge is central to reading and reading comprehension. Five topics will be addressed over the next few weeks:

1 Oral Language Development of Vocabulary—as the basis for reading vocabulary
2 The Matthew Effect—the impact of early vocabulary development and the achievement gap
3 Academic Vocabulary
4 Vocabulary Differences in Narrative and Information Texts
5 Vocabulary Instruction.

Oral Language Development of Vocabulary: Three Perspectives

Speaking and Listening for Preschool Through Grade Three, Lauren B. Resnick and Catherine B. Snow, IRA, 2009
“Speaking and listening are the foundation of reading and writing. A child who does not have a large and fluent vocabulary will have difficulty with every aspect of reading, from recognizing or sounding out words to making sense of a story or directions.” (p. vi)
“From the time they are infants until they are about 8 years old, children learn most of what they know by hearing other people talk: Talking is the main way children get to know the world, understand complex events, and encounter different perspectives.” (p. 3)

Harvard Graduate School of Education, Winter 2001 by Lori Hough
The beginning of the reading process…

“The reading process begins, of course, way before kids even walk into classes like McCaffrey’s.  As Shonkoff, a former pediatrician and current director of Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child, says, “Kids learn to understand words before they speak them.” As soon as parents and caregivers pick up a cooing baby and coo back, the process begins, with the baby beginning to understand the back and forth of conversation.
By the time a child is 18 months old, Shonkoff writes in his book, From Neurons to Neighborhoods, their world is a language explosion, acquiring, on average, about nine new words a day, every day, through preschool.”  … He continues

“By the time children enter formal education, it is estimated that they know the meaning of about 5,000 to 6,000 words when they hear them, and can probably recognize in print a handful of easily memorized “sight words” — words like “the” and “to” and “stop” that pop up often in books and on signs and menus.”

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
The Importance of the Number of Words Known by Age Five for Later School Achievement by Andrew Biemiller.
“Children who do not know many words by the end of kindergarten often have poor reading comprehension in later grades. By the time children begin kindergarten, they have already acquired much of their language. They speak in sentences and they understand simple stories and simple explanations. By 5 years of age, most children probably know more than one or two thousand root word meanings.”…..
“I estimate that by the beginning of kindergarten, children’s vocabulary size ranges from 2300 root word meanings (average for children with low vocabularies) to 4700 root word meanings (average for children with high vocabularies).
During the grades from kindergarten to grade two, the difference between children with small and large vocabularies continues to get larger. By the end of grade two, children in the low vocabulary group average 4000 root word meanings, children in the average vocabulary group know about 6000 meanings, and children in the large vocabulary group average 8000 meanings. These large vocabulary differences have developed before children have had much of an opportunity to build vocabulary from their own reading. Beginning readers (kindergarten-grade two) mainly read “primer” texts using relatively few words.”  …..  He continues:
“In this section, I discuss how words are learned and how some children come to know many more words than other children. I will also discuss how home differences and child-care interventions affect word development.”  He also gives offers several lists of specific words:
“See Table 1 for a list of some preschool words and their meanings. See Table 2 for a list of word meanings recommended for attention, explanation, or instruction for children ages 3 to 5 years. [There are approximately 40 pages that make up these lists.”


Tuesday, February 14, 2017

The Development of “articulation skills”




“Believe it or not, children begin to develop these skills starting at BIRTH! I know I know, babies are not born talking…but they are born listening and listening is the first step in learning how to produce speech sounds, which in turn will turn into meaningful words, phrases and sentences! If I remember correctly (I’ll go find the study and link it back here) children learn the sounds of their native language by NINE MONTHS OF AGE!”

Growing more and more “articulate”

http://www.eps.n-cook.k12.il.us/epsweb/rosenberg/site/articulation.html 
“Children develop the ability to produce speech sounds at different rates. For example, research shows that two year olds are 50-75% intelligible, while three-year olds are 75-100% intelligible. That means it’s normal if a 3-year old talks, and you only understand 3/4 of what he/she says…..”

Progressing from oral to written sounds
Learning “sounds” progresses from oral to written language with the development of phonics, an essential skill in learning to read.  Here are links that addresses the relevant phonological/phonemic awareness and phonics/decoding skills.

Phonological/phonemic awareness skills

Phonics instruction helps children learn the relationships between the letters of written language and the sounds of spoken language.



Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Language Development: A Starting Place for a Child's Development


A short excerpt.  Click link to see the entire posting.

I will use a Sound-Word-Sentence-Discourse framework to trace the development of oral language and its relationship to reading, beginning here with Sounds. Both the oral language development literature and the reading development literature are relevant. Taking the position that learning to read begins with oral language, an understanding of language development is critical.
We can trace the development of sounds and phonology (specifically, for our interests in early literacy, phonological awareness and the alphabetic principle)
Development
*discrimination and articulation of sounds
*phonological awareness
*the alphabetic principles (sound/letter relationships)

Sounds: Oral Language Development Literature
There are several relevant developmental progressions for “sounds” or “sounds into words”. Of course, children learn about “sounds” before they learn about “written” words, although they know a great deal about “oral” words before they can read them.